  We study the critical behavior of a continuous opinion model, driven by
kinetic exchanges in a fully-connected population. Opinions range in the real
interval $[-1,1]$, representing the different shades of opinions against and
for an issue under debate. Individual's opinions evolve through pairwise
interactions, with couplings that are typically positive, but a fraction $p$ of
negative ones is allowed. Moreover, a social temperature parameter $T$ controls
the tendency of the individual responses towards neutrality. Depending on $p$
and $T$, different collective states emerge: symmetry broken (one side wins),
symmetric (tie of opposite sides) and absorbing neutral (indecision wins). We
find the critical points and exponents that characterize the phase transitions
between them. The symmetry breaking transition belongs to the usual Ising
mean-field universality class, but the absorbing-phase transitions, with
$\beta=0.5$, are out of the paradigmatic directed percolation class. Moreover,
ordered phases can emerge by increasing social temperature.

Physics and Society;Statistical Mechanics