A Schelling-opinion model: residential segregation and opinion formation

VICTORIA ARCON; JUAN PABLO PINASCO; INÉS CARIDI

Causes and Symptoms of Socio-Cultural Polarization: Role of Information and Communication Technologies

Springer

Lugar: Springer; Año: 2022; p. 2 - 26

Residential segregation is a social and economic issue of concern, with implications at the economic, educational, and health levels. Fifty years ago, Schellingintroduced a model of interacting agents of two types to warn that mild discriminatory mechanism can still generate high global segregation levels. That work gave rise to many variants and was a pioneer in the agent-based approach to model social phenomena. In this work, we add a second feature to agents, their opinion state, giving rise to a variant that allows us to combine two mechanisms (social influence and mobility dynamics), which could relate to the emergence of polarized neighbor-hoods. Here, unhappy agents can move to another place (as in the classical Schellingmodel) or change opinions by imitating one of their neighbors. We show that these mechanisms create and sustain both segregation and polarization, by creating echo chambers dynamically. We present results about the patterns in which clusters of different types and opinions arise under this model?s rules and study their variation depending on the model?s weight parameter, which determines the importance of each feature on the agent?s level of satisfaction with its neighborhood.