Unanimity, Coexistence, and Rigidity: Three Sides of Polarization

Success-driven opinion formation determines social tensions

Polarization is common in politics and public opinion. It is believed to be shaped by media as well as ideologies, and often incited by misinformation. However, little is known about the microscopic dynamics behind polarization and the resulting social tensions. By coupling opinion formation with the strategy selection in different social dilemmas, we reveal how success at an individual level transforms to global consensus or lack thereof. When defection carries with it the fear of punishment in the absence of greed, as in the stag-hunt game, opinion fragmentation is the smallest. Conversely, if defection promises a higher payoff and also evokes greed, like in the prisoner's dilemma and snowdrift game, consensus is more difficult to attain. Our research thus challenges the top-down narrative of social tensions, showing they might originate from fundamental principles at individual level, like the desire to prevail in pairwise evolutionary comparisons.

Modeling opinion misperception and the emergence of silence in online social system

In the last decades an increasing deal of research has investigated the phenomenon of opinion misperception in human communities and, more recently, in social media. Opinion misperception is the wrong evaluation by community's members of the real distribution of opinions or beliefs about a given topic. In this work we explore the mechanisms giving rise to opinion misperception in social media groups, which are larger than physical ones and have peculiar topological features. By means of numerical simulations, we suggest that the structure of connections of such communities plays indeed a role in distorting the perception of the agents about others' beliefs, but it is essentially an indirect effect. Moreover, we show that the main ingredient that generates misperception is a spiral of silence induced by few, well connected and charismatic agents, which rapidly drives the majority of individuals to stay silent without disclosing their true belief, leading minoritarian opinions to appear more widespread throughout the community.

Three-state opinion model with mobile agents

We study an agent-based opinion model with two extreme (opposite) opinion states and a neutral intermediate one. We adjust the relative degree of conviction between extremists and neutrals through a dimensionless parameter called the "neutrality parameter" to investigate its impact on the outcome of the system. In our model, agents move randomly on a plane with periodic boundary conditions and interact with each other only when they are within a fixed distance threshold. We examine different movement mechanisms and their interplay with the neutrality parameter. Our results show that in general, mobility promotes the global consensus, especially for extreme opinions. However, it takes significantly less time to reach a consensus on the neutral opinion.