Corazzini, Luca & Pavesi, Filippo & Petrovich, Beatrice & Stanca, Luca, 2012. "Influential listeners: An experiment on persuasion bias in social networks," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(6), pages 1276-1288.

Using one my model I have predicted successfully the very unexpected rejection of the 2005 French referendum on the project of European Constitution. I even have alert before hand on the danger of holding referendum about the European construction few years before. A piece from the conclusion of a 2004 paper:

"Applying our results to the European Union leads to the conclusion that it would berathermisleadingtoinitiatelargepublicdebatesinmostoftheinvolvedcountries. Indeed, even starting from a huge initial majority of people in favor of the European Union, an open and free debate would lead to the creation of huge majority hostile to the European Union. This provides a strong ground to legitimize the on-going reluctance of most European governments to hold referendum on associated issues. "

From: S. Galam, « The dynamics of minority opinion in democratic debate », Physica A 336 (2004) 56-62

Using another model I have predicted the repetitive occurrence of hung elections at fifty/fifty in 2004 and indeed it did occurred. From the 2004 conclusion:

"Accordingly the associated “hanging chad elections” syndrome could become of a common occurrence in the near future."

From: S. Galam, « Contrarian deterministic effect: the hung elections scenario », Physica A 333 (2004) 453-460

But of course those predictions do not validate the models of opinion dynamics as proved models but instead validate the approach behind them. I refer to my book "Sociophysics, A Physicist's Modeling of Psycho-political Phenomena" published by Springer in 2012 in which I discuss lengthy those questions.

One paper in French is attached. Unfortunately the system does not allow more attachments

Hi Luca, Serge,

Thanks for the answer. Do you know about any experiment that attempts to measure the impact of opinions on the consumption habits of public goods?

Thanks

Andrew Healy (Loyola Marymount Univ.) has a few papers on voting and opinion dynamics, for example his 2009 Experimental Economics paper might be useful.

http://myweb.lmu.edu/ahealy/papers.htm

Don't know if this is relevant, but there is an experiment showing that people draw different conclusions when presented the same evidence, contrary to the predictions of most models of opinion dynamics.

http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/mic.4.1.209

see the paper of Celen and Kariv in the AER 2004 for a laboratory experiment... or the various papers on buy/sell recommendations in finance, or on herding of forecasters (including my own), if you want to deal with real population data...

Matthias, Norbert, thanks for your recommendations. That info is very helpful.

It is strange that I found this because I was looking myself for examples (and Galam was one suggested: Here are some I have found:

Bernardes, A. T., Stauffer, D. and Kertész, J. (2001) ‘Election Results and the Sznajd Model on Barabasi Network’, The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 25(1), January, pp. 123-127. doi:10.1142/S0129183101001584 Bernardes, A. T., Costa, U. M. S., Araujo, A. D. and Stauffer, D. (2002) ‘Damage Spreading, Coarsening Dynamics and Distribution of Political Votes in Sznajd Model on Square Lattice’, International Journal of Modern Physics C: Computational Physics and Physical Computation, 12(2), February, pp. 159-168. doi:10.1140/e10051-002-0013-y Brousmiche, Kei-Leo, Kant, Jean-Daniel, Sabouret, Nicolas and Prenot-Guinard, François (2016) ‘From Beliefs to Attitudes: Polias, A Model of Attitude Dynamics Based on Cognitive Modelling and Field Data’, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 19(4), October, article 2, . doi:10.18564/jasss.3161 Caruso, Filippo and Castorina, Paolo (2005) ‘Opinion Dynamics and Decision of Vote in Bipolar Political Systems’, arXiv > Physics > Physics and Society, 26 March, version 2. doi:10.1142/S0129183105008059 Chattoe-Brown, Edmund (2014) ‘Using Agent Based Modelling to Integrate Data on Attitude Change’, Sociological Research Online, 19(1), February, article 16, . doi:0.5153/sro.3315 Duggins, Peter (2017) ‘A Psychologically-Motivated Model of Opinion Change with Applications to American Politics’, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 20(1), January, article 13, . doi:10.18564/jasss.3316 Fortunato, Santo and Castellano, Claudio (2007) ‘Scaling and Universality in Proportional Elections’, Physical Review Letters, 99(13), 28 September, article 138701. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.138701

Sobkowicz P (2016) Quantitative Agent Based Model of Opinion Dynamics: Polish Elections of 2015. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155098. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0155098

But I think you may need to nuance the question slightly. You could legitimately "validate" an OD model using a lab experiment but that would not validate it in the "real world". The difference hinges on whether you think that opinion change is "purely" psychological or may depend on other things like the media. My paper in the above list may help on that also.

Dear Edmund

A pertinent question, indeed. A former PhD student tried to simulate opinion dynamics based on longitudinal survey data. In fact we were not super sucessful but we discuss some of the lessons learnt. Check out Article Opinion Communication on Contested Topics: How Empirics and ...

It depends not only in how empiric data is acquired, but also on which concept or theory you use. I think opinion dynamics models may be successful in resembling or predicting real opinions on a global level, but its hard to build ABMs and predict individual opinion changes.

Thank you Roman. I have added that to the list I am compiling. Not even empirical modellers seem to cite each other much, let alone "theorists".

Dear Edmund,

I can recommend you two of my articles, in which I study longitudinal data from an online social network:

Ivan V. Kozitsin (2020) Formal models of opinion formation and their application to real data: evidence from online social networks, The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, DOI: 10.1080/0022250X.2020.1835894

Ivan V. Kozitsin (2021) Opinion dynamics of online social network users: a micro-level analysis, The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, DOI: 10.1080/0022250X.2021.1956917

By the way, in the last one, you can find a small review which addresses the question of interest. However, as I see, many of the papers appeared in this thread were not included in this review(

Dear Roman,

thank you for interesting paper. I tend to agree with your idea regarding micro and macro predictions.

Thank you Ivan. I think this thread is very useful because we have all missed things. (I even managed to miss something in what I thought was a systematic review of one journal!) The problem is that you cannot search for "uses real data" in the same way you can search for "Zaller-Deffuant".

Absolutely agree.

Something new:

Article Achieving consensus in multilateral international negotiatio...

This is deliberately designed to provoke a proper empirical response: https://rofasss.org/2022/02/01/citing-od-models/ I wonder if people on this thread should deliberately work together to do a critical review of OD models. We could divide the search and reading ...