Evolution of the Public’s Attitude toward NIMBY Incidents based on Opinion Dynamics Theory: An Agent-based Model

Abstract

NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) incidents often affect the progress of infrastructure construction and sometime may cause social instability. The public’s NIMBY attitude is affected by various factors, which also lead to the development of NIMBY incidents. To explore the influence of the public’s internal composition and external environment on the evolution of the public’s NIMBY attitude, a bounded trust model of the public’s continuous viewpoint to a NIMBY event is constructed in this study based on opinion dynamics theory. The evolution process of the public’s attitude in different internal and external situations is also simulated. Among the public, the evolution of the individual public’s NIMBY attitude is affected by the individual communication in their network of relations. According to their degree of influence, the public can be divided into three categories: ordinary individuals, opinion leaders, and diehards. In external environment, the public’s attitude is influenced by the timeliness and compensation degree of the government’s response to a NIMBY incident and the information transmitted by the media. The simulation results show that during the public’s opinion exchange, opinion leaders and diehards in a group usually have a strong impact on the evolution of the public’s NIMBY opinion. Moreover, the government’s environmental compensation can only alleviate the NIMBY conflict temporarily. The findings also indicate that the government and the media should maintain the authenticity of information disclosure, and public participation and multiparty cooperation mechanism should also be encouraged.