Abstract
By embedding opinions in a nonorthogonal topic space, a new model shows that a reinforcement mechanism driven by homophilic social interactions reproduces extreme and correlated opinion states found in surveys.
Highlights
The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions pose a challenge: How can such correlations emerge, without assuming them a priori in individual preferences or in a preexisting social structure? Here, we propose a simple model that qualitatively reproduces ideological opinion states found in survey data, even between rather unrelated, but sufficiently controversial, topics
According to classical opinion dynamics models in which social interactions add constructively to opinion formation, the increasing interaction rates of modern societies would eventually lead to a global consensus, even on controversial issues [1,2,3]
We find that the coevolution of social interactions and opinions can lead to extreme opinions, but can cause issue alignment
Summary
According to classical opinion dynamics models in which social interactions add constructively to opinion formation, the increasing interaction rates of modern societies would eventually lead to a global consensus, even on controversial issues [1,2,3]. Other attempts include extensions of both Heider’s cognitive balance [33] and argument communication theory [23] to multiple dimensions, in wellmixed populations [34,35,36] All these works assume an a priori, static social network structure (or a well-mixed population) as a substrate for opinion formation and/or encode issue alignment directly as correlations between individual attributes. Topics can be controversial and mutually overlapping; i.e., there may exist an intersection of arguments that is valid for several topics With these assumptions, our model generates three different scenarios: (i) convergence toward a global consensus, (ii) polarization of noncorrelated opinions, and (iii) polarization with issue alignment, i.e., a polarized ideological state. Our approach follows a similar idea: If the orthogonality of topics is relaxed, i.e., if topics can overlap, the correlation between opinions with respect to different topics can naturally emerge through the proposed reinforcement dynamics from social interactions
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