Differentiation without Distancing. Explaining Bi-Polarization of Opinions without Negative Influence

Mäs, Michael; Flache, Andreas

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0074516

Cited by 173 publications

(204 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…Previous work demonstrates that homophilious contagion leads to preference divergence especially when agents are negatively influenced by others who are socially different (Mäs and Flache 2013).…”

Section: Homophilymentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Goldberg

Stein

2018

Preprint

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Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. In this paper, we propose an alternative explanation which we refer to as associative diffusion. Drawing on two insights from research in cognition-that meaning inheres in cognitive associations between concepts, and that such perceived associations constrain people's actionswe propose a model wherein, rather than beliefs or behaviors per-se, the things being transmitted between individuals are perceptions about what beliefs or behaviors are compatible with one another. Conventional contagion models require an assumption of network segregation to explain cultural variation. In contrast, we demonstrate that the endogenous emergence of cultural differentiation can be entirely attributable to social cognition and does not necessitate a clustered social network or a preexisting division into groups. Moreover, we show that prevailing assumptions about the effects of network topology do not hold when diffusion is associative. * Direct all correspondence to Amir Goldberg: amirgo@stanford.edu; 650-725-7926. We thank Rembrand M. Koning, Daniel A. McFarland, Paul DiMaggio, Sarah Soule, John-Paul Ferguson, Jesper Sørensen, Glenn Carroll and Sameer B. Srivastava for helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

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Section: Homophilymentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Goldberg

Stein

2018

Preprint

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“…For this reason, Carro et al [44] devoted part of their study to the role played by nonuniform initial conditions, a topic that we shall also examine in this work. In general, the Deffuant model, despite its conceptual simplicity, provides a fertile ground for creative extensions and model variants (recent interesting works include [45][46][47]). …”

Section: Bounded Confidence and Relative Agreement Opinion Change Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extremism without extremists: Deffuant model with emotions

Sobkowicz

2015

Front. Phys.

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The frequent occurrence of extremist views in many social contexts, often growing from small minorities to almost total majority, poses a significant challenge for democratic societies. The phenomenon can be described within the sociophysical paradigm. We present a modified version of the continuous bounded confidence opinion model, including a simple description of the influence of emotions on tolerances, and eventually on the evolution of opinions. Allowing for psychologically based correlation between the extreme opinions, high emotions and low tolerance for other people's views leads to quick dominance of the extreme views within the studied model, without introducing a special class of agents, as has been done in previous works. This dominance occurs even if the initial numbers of people with extreme opinions is very small. Possible suggestions related to mitigation of the process are briefly discussed.

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“…During the interaction, agent i randomly receives an argument from the set of arguments of agent j. Rather than accepting the argument directly like that in [31], agent i further needs to randomly pick one argument from her own set of arguments. If the two arguments are equal (both pro or both con), then agent i accepts the argument, that is, adds a new argument of the same bias into her set of arguments, and randomly drops one argument from the set.…”

Section: Biased Assimilation Of Argumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi‐agent model of group polarisation with biased assimilation of arguments

Liu

Zhao

Wang

2015

IET Control Theory & Applications

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This study studies the opinion dynamics with group polarisation. The authors say a process of opinion formation is polarising if the final opinions after group discussion are more divergent than individuals' initial opinions. To capture this phenomenon, they develop a multi-agent model of opinion formation in which each agent forms their opinion according to all arguments available to them, and during interacting with other agents, they assimilate the arguments of neighbours in a biased manner which can be represented by a modified Polya's urn process. They find that biased assimilation of arguments can result in group polarisation effectively, especially under the condition when the agents are relatively isolated in the network.

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Differentiation without Distancing. Explaining Bi-Polarization of Opinions without Negative Influence

Cited by 173 publications

References 80 publications

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

Extremism without extremists: Deffuant model with emotions

Multi‐agent model of group polarisation with biased assimilation of arguments

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