Abstract
The frequent occurrence of extremist views in many social contexts, often growing from small minorities to almost total majority, poses a significant challenge for democratic societies. The phenomenon can be described within the sociophysical paradigm. We present a modified version of the continuous bounded confidence opinion model, including a simple description of the influence of emotions on tolerances, and eventually on the evolution of opinions. Allowing for psychologically based correlation between the extreme opinions, high emotions and low tolerance for other people's views leads to quick dominance of the extreme views within the studied model, without introducing a special class of agents, as has been done in previous works. This dominance occurs even if the initial numbers of people with extreme opinions is very small. Possible suggestions related to mitigation of the process are briefly discussed.
Highlights
Modeling of opinion dynamics is one of the core domains of sociophysics, rising in popularity since the early 1990’s
Using the well known bounded confidence framework, in which opinions may take any value from a continuous spectrum, we introduce a correlation between the extreme opinions and low flexibility, mediated via a persons emotion
Results for Uniform Distribution of Initial Opinions We shall start our discussion of the results with the simulations using a uniform, random distribution of the initial opinions within the [0 : 1] domain. This is a typical assumption used in many opinion dynamics models, which provides easy implementation
Summary
Modeling of opinion dynamics is one of the core domains of sociophysics, rising in popularity since the early 1990’s. Despite the differences in many basic properties of these models: the available opinion space (binary opinions, multiple discrete values or continuous spectrum); the social network (fully connected, geometrical, small-world or scale free network); the specific method of describing the interactions between agents—all these works point out that the presence of even a small group of agents with fixed opinions may sway a large part of the community or even the whole of it. These special agents get labeled in various ways: zealots, inflexibles, independents or extremists. The diversity of the models is due to different kinds of simplifications of social
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