The Interplay Between Conformity and Anticonformity and its Polarizing Effect on Society

Abstract

Abstract:Simmering debates leading to polarization are observed in many domains. Although empirical findings show a strong correlation between this phenomenon and modularity of a social network, still little is known about the actual mechanisms driving communities to conflicting opinions. In this paper, we used an agentbased model to check if the polarization may be induced by a competition between two types of social response: conformity and anticonformity. The proposed model builds on the q-voter model (Castellano et al. b) and uses a double-clique topology in order to capture segmentation of a community. Our results indicate that the interplay between intra-clique conformity and inter-clique anticonformity may indeed lead to a bi-polarized state of the entire system. We have found a dynamic phase transition controlled by the fraction L of negative cross-links between cliques. In the regime of small values of L the system is able to reach the total positive consensus. If the values of L are large enough, anticonformity takes over and the system always ends up in a polarized stated. Putting it the other way around, the segmentation of the network is not a su icient condition for the polarization to appear. A suitable level of antagonistic interactions between segments is required to arrive at a polarized steady state within our model.

Person-Situation Debate Revisited: Phase Transitions with Quenched and Annealed Disorders

“…Figure 1a presents phase diagrams obtained for the annealed q-voter model with independence, obtained from Equation (10), whereas Figure 1b shows phase diagrams for the quenched model, obtained from Equation (9). The most striking difference is the change of transition type from discontinuous in the annealed (situation) approach, to continuous in the quenched (person) approach, for q ≥ 6.…”

“…As a prime example of an opinion formation model, the q-voter dynamics has gained a great deal of attention in recent studies [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. As a spreading mechanism, it finds many applications not only 1.…”

The Hunt Opinion Model—An Agent Based Approach to Recurring Fashion Cycles

“…Later on, this idea has been applied to other Ising-type models (see a short review in [21]). However, to the best of our knowledge, the relativity of conformity vs. anticonformity has been considered for the first time only very recently, in a simple model of two interacting cliques [22]. The model has been built on a modified version of the q -voter model [23, 24], which occurred to be very interesting both from the theoretical [25–29] and the applicative [30–33] points of view.…”

“…Therefore, the model introduced in [22] reminds of the Ising model with competing ferromagnetic interactions between nearest neighbors and antiferromagnetic between next nearest neighbors [34–36]. From this point of view, the existence of the critical value of the interplay between conformity and anticonformity, below which consensus exists, is not very surprising.…”

“…It is also worth to recall that the two-community structure has been already investigated in the context of the Ising model in [37, 38] and the linear voter model [39], but in all these papers only ferromagnetic interactions were investigated. Here we propose a modification of a model introduced in [22] that could not be easily motivated by any physical problem but is very interesting from the social point of view—we break the symmetry between cliques.…”