Diffusion of Opinions in a Complex Culture System

Abstract

People take descriptive norms into account when making decisions, even when they do not personally believe in the norms; when the norms do not correspond to the actual preferences of the group; and when the decision is a high stake one. A prevailing challenge in culture and norm research is to identify the sociocultural processes through which ideas spread and become part of the descriptive norms in the society, as well as the processes through which the diffusion of ideas is contained. In the present article, the authors review two emerging communication perspectives on idea diffusion and norm emergence: neo-diffusionism and complexity theory. In addition, the authors illustrate in an agent-based modeling study how complexity theory can shed new light on how opinions spread through interpersonal communication in a complex cultural system. Preliminary results show that as long as most agents in the system prefer talking to others sharing the same opinion, the relative distribution of majority and minority opinions in the system will not change. Interestingly, when egocentric speech is coupled with the preference to communicate with dissimilar others, the level of cognitive homogeneity level (i.e., opinion consensus) in the system increases. In contrast, when audience design is coupled with the preference to communicate with dissimilar others, the level of cognitive diversity level in the system increases. The implications of the results for emergence of descriptive norms are discussed.