Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting

ZIMMERMAN, FEDERICO; PEDRAZA, LUCIA; NAVAJAS, JOAQUIN; BALENZUELA, PABLO

Conferencia; International School and Conference on Network Science; 2023

In this work, we propose an agent-based model to study the mechanism underlying polarizationand ideological sorting in a group of agents. Based on experimental results, we assume that the twomain mechanisms driving interactions are homophily, in which people who share similar opinionsare more likely to interact, and in-group-coherence favoritism, in which they are more attracted tocoherent in-groups rather than incoherent or out-group members. Interestingly, by incorporating thislatter assumption, we were able to observe ideological alignment as observed in political opinions.Additionally, by solving the model’s master equations and fitting the model’s parameters with opinions from survey’s data and experiments we show that a combination of homophily and in-groupcoherence is the best explanation for the emergence of ideological sorting.