Polarizing crowds: consensus and bipolarization in a persuasive arguments model

FEDERICO BARRERA LEMARCHAND; SEMESHENKO, VIKTORIYA; JOAQUIN NAVAJAS; BALENZUELA, PABLO

CHAOS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JR OF NONLINEAR SCIENCE

AMER INST PHYSICS

Lugar: New York; Año: 2020

1054-1500

Understanding the opinion formation dynamics in social systems is of vast relevance in diverse aspects of society. In particular, it is relevantfor political deliberation and other group decision-making processes. Although previous research has reported different approaches to modelsocial dynamics, most of them focused on interaction mechanisms where individuals modify their opinions in line with the opinions ofothers, without invoking a latent mechanism of argumentation. In this paper, we present a model where changes of opinion are mediateddue to explicit exchanges of arguments and analyze the emerging collective states in terms of simple dynamic rules. We find that, wheninteractions are equiprobable and symmetrical, the model only shows consensus solutions. However, when either homophily, confirmationbias, or both are included, we observe the emergence and dominance of bipolarization, which appears due to the fact that individuals are notable to accept the contrary information from their opponents during exchanges of arguments. In all cases, the predominance of each stablestate depends on the relation between the number of agents and the number of available arguments in the discussion. Overall, this paperdescribes the dynamics and shows the conditions wherein deliberative agents are expected to construct polarized societies.