Opinion disparity in hypergraphs with community structure.

Abstract

The division of a social group into subgroups with opposing opinions, which we refer to as opinion disparity, is a prevalent phenomenon in society. This phenomenon has been modeled by including mechanisms such as opinion homophily, bounded confidence interactions, and social reinforcement mechanisms. In this paper, we study a complementary mechanism for the formation of opinion disparity based on higher-order interactions, i.e., simultaneous interactions between multiple agents. We present an extension of the planted partition model for uniform hypergraphs as a simple model of community structure, and we consider the hypergraph Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model on a hypergraph with two communities where the binary ideology can spread via links (pairwise interactions) and triangles (three-way interactions). We approximate this contagion process with a mean-field model and find that for strong enough community structure, the two communities can hold very different average opinions. We determine the regimes of structural and infectious parameters for which this opinion disparity can exist, and we find that the existence of these disparities is much more sensitive to the triangle community structure than to the link community structure. We show that the existence and type of opinion disparities are extremely sensitive to differences in the sizes of the two communities.