Abstract
The article describes the current status and potential directions of development of Agent Based Models (ABMs) of social opinion dynamics. Despite extensive effort, the models achieve, at best, only qualitative agreement with social observations. To understand the increasingly pressing issues such as all-encompassing political and social polarization, resurgence of fundamentalist and populist movements, persistence of socially dangerous trends such as denial of climate change or the anti-vaccination activism, the models must be capable of handling much more complex set of agent characteristics, content of the communications (between agents and through media) as well as psychologically adequate reaction mechanisms and realistic influence networks. Moreover, to meet the challenge of understanding the globally growing political polarization and changes brought by increasing reliance on electronic communication the models should adapt to the post-truth era. It is necessary to include in the models phenomena such as fake news, omnipresent exaggerations and stereotypes, trolling and algorithmic biases funnelling personal information universe. We also need to consider that most social systems may be described as transient, out-of-equilibrium ones, where a crucial role is played by the models' initial conditions. In this work we analyse the challenges facing the modelling community and point out certain promising directions for development.
Highlights
The idea to use the concepts and rigor of physical sciences to describe social phenomena dates back as far as 18th century
As in the case of vaccination support, the political, social, and psychological literature devoted to extremism and polarization are quite rich
The pro-vaccination stance of wellrecognizable nonprofessionals appears to have less importance than a similar activity of anti-vaccination celebrities. This may be due to a lesser emotional appeal and to the campaign to decrease the trust in experts by the anti-vaccination movement
Summary
The idea to use the concepts and rigor of physical sciences to describe social phenomena dates back as far as 18th century. The arguments were not just purely scientific—applying to social sciences the same requirements as to physics or chemistry was proposed as the means of promoting progress through better understanding. It was only during the last decades of the 20th century, when advances in physics of complex systems and in computer technologies have allowed actual possibility to apply these ideas. The parallel rise in Internet-based interactions and social networks, which have allowed to observe at least the expressed opinions and to follow the patterns of connections between people and their reactions to various types of messages, has allowed the models to get closer to quantitative description goals, at least for some of the characteristic features. We shall describe the history and current status of the agentbased models of opinion dynamics and the potential directions of development and choices faced by the research community
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