Dynamics of Uncertain Opinion Formation: An Agent-Based Simulation

Abstract

Opinion formation describes the dynamics of opinions in a group of interaction agents and is a powerful tool for predicting the evolution and diffusion of the opinions. The existing opinion formation studies assume that the agents express their opinions by using the exact number, i.e., the exact opinions. However, when people express their opinions, sentiments, and support emotions regarding different issues, such as politics, products, and events, they often cannot provide the exact opinions but express uncertain opinions. Furthermore, due to the differences in culture backgrounds and characters of agents, people who encounter uncertain opinions often show different uncertainty tolerances. The goal of this study is to investigate the dynamics of uncertain opinion formation in the framework of bounded confidence. By taking different uncertain opinions and different uncertainty tolerances into account, we use an agent-based simulation to investigate the influences of uncertain opinions in opinion formation from two aspects: the ratios of the agents that express uncertain opinions and the widths of the uncertain opinions, and also provide the explanations of the observations obtained.