Why popular opinions spread faster: a physics model explains

A new model of how opinions spread treats social influence as proportional to an opinion's perceived utility, borrowing tools from statistical physics. When everyone clusters around one view, the group's mean opinion follows a Gibbs-like distribution — the same math used to describe atoms in a heat bath — with a 'temperature' set by how fast people update their beliefs and how many of them there are. For divisive issues with multiple attractive opinion states, the model predicts spontaneous, random switching between camps, matching computer simulations of individual agents.