Collective leadership and herding may arise in standard models of opinion dynamics as an interplay of a strong separation of time scales within the population and its hierarchical organization. Using the voter model as a simple opinion formation model, we show that, in the herding phase, a group of agents become effectively the leaders of the dynamics while the rest of the population follow blindly their opinion. Interestingly, in some cases such herding dynamics accelerates the time to consensus, which then becomes size independent or, on the contrary, makes the consensus nearly impossible. These behaviors have important consequences when an external noise is added to the system that makes consensus (absorbing) states to disappear. We analyze this model, which shows an interesting phase diagram, with a purely diffusive phase, a herding (or two-states) phase, and mixed phases where both behaviors are possible.

• Received 21 April 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.96.012310