A Psychologically-Motivated Model of Opinion Change with Applications to American Politics

Abstract

Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural di usion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using empirically-motivated rules governing interpersonal influence, commitment to previous beliefs, and conformity in social contexts. Computational experiments establish that these extensions produce three novel results: (a) sustained "strong" diversity of opinions within the population, (b) opinion subcultures, and (c) pluralistic ignorance. These phenomena arise from a combination of agents' intolerance, susceptibility and conformity, with extremist agents and social networks playing important roles. The distribution and dynamics of simulated opinions reproduce two empirical datasets on Americans' political opinions.

Compartmental voter model

“…Various modifications of the well-known models were proposed to account for these features, such as inflexibility [8,9] or spontaneous flipping [10,11]. Some of the models were modified to account for the theories from the social sciences [12,13]. Effects of these modifications are still being actively reconsidered in context of network theory, non-linearity, complex contagion and applications towards financial markets [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

Stability Analysis of a Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics Model for Biased Assimilation

“…For many established models [3], [11], [14], [17], the example initial states above will yield max i x i (0) ≥ max i x i (∞). Some models [12], [15], [22] can have max i x i (0) < max i x i (∞), but only exhibit extreme polarization (see Section III-B below) exists in [12], [15], [22], and not extreme consensus.…”

“…Most of the models discussed above are not able to predict polarization or extremization. Some models do exist in the literature which can predict polarization or extremization [12], [15], [22], but typically attributes this phenomenon to antagonistic interactions that increase in strength as the difference in opinions between individuals grow, and only [15] has provided analysis for its proposed model.…”

Multi-choice opinion dynamics model based on Latané theory

“…Simulations of opinion dynamics [1] are core subject of sociophysics [2], an interdisciplinary field of research in complex systems directly connected to computational sociology. Numerous examples of such research are published in interdisciplinary sections of physical journals [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10], and in journals devoted to computational sociology [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The models of opinions dynamics deals with binary (or Boolean), Ising-like [18] variables, corresponding to two-states models of opinions [19][20][21][22] or multi-state, but still discrete state opinions models [6,23] or discrete vector-like variables [7].…”