How does public opinion become extreme?

Marlon Ramos,Saulo D S Reis,Jia Shao,Shlomo Havlin,Celia Anteneodo,Hernán A Makse,José S Andrade

doi:10.1038/srep10032

Abstract

We investigate the emergence of extreme opinion trends in society by employing statistical physics modeling and analysis on polls that inquire about a wide range of issues such as religion, economics, politics, abortion, extramarital sex, books, movies, and electoral vote. The surveys lay out a clear indicator of the rise of extreme views. The precursor is a nonlinear relation between the fraction of individuals holding a certain extreme view and the fraction of individuals that includes also moderates, e.g., in politics, those who are “very conservative” versus “moderate to very conservative” ones. We propose an activation model of opinion dynamics with interaction rules based on the existence of individual “stubbornness” that mimics empirical observations. According to our modeling, the onset of nonlinearity can be associated to an abrupt bootstrap-percolation transition with cascades of extreme views through society. Therefore, it represents an early-warning signal to forecast the transition from moderate to extreme views. Moreover, by means of a phase diagram we can classify societies according to the percolative regime they belong to, in terms of critical fractions of extremists and people’s ties.

Highlights

The root causes of the rise of extreme opinions in society constitute nowadays a matter of intense debate among leading scholars[1,2,3,4,5,6]
To what extent does this interaction help to shape the public opinion? Can extreme views arise just from the interactions between individuals? The answers to these questions can help us to understand the dynamics of polarization of public opinions and make it possible to detect the trend to polarization
From the analysis of these static data, we will extract clear evidence of radicalization in groups in the form of nonlinear behaviour near critical points and avalanche dynamics in belief spreading via critical transitions in the bootstrap percolation universality class

Summary

OPEN How does public opinion become extreme?

Marlon Ramos1, 2, 3, *, Jia Shao4, *, Saulo D. From the analysis of these static data, we will extract clear evidence of radicalization in groups in the form of nonlinear behaviour near critical points and avalanche dynamics in belief spreading via critical transitions in the bootstrap percolation universality class Such transitions shed light on the precise instance of the transition when groups adopt more extreme views. It is well known in statistical physics[11], that correlations among the units, that appear specially near a phase transition, lead to nonlinear behaviour and non-extensivity This effect is called allometry in the field of socio-physics and is currently being investigated, for instance, in the scaling with the size of cities of different urban indicators like technology activity[12] and health indicators[13,14]. We show that the cascading is a consequence of an underlying bootstrap-percolation transition occurring at the tipping point when societies abruptly change from moderate to extreme

Results

Final Remarks

Methods

Additional Information