Group Polarization Based on Agent Emotional Characteristics and Credibility

Abstract

The frequent occurrence of group polarization in many internet mass incidents produces adverse impacts on the social stability and poses a significant challenge for social management. We construct an opinion evolution model with agent emotional characteristics and credibility based on the Deffuant model to study the evolutionary mechanism of group polarization, which connects the agent’s firmness with the agent’s opinion, taking a full account of the agent heterogeneity. We analyze the impacts of initial opinion distribution, network structure, and opinion leader on the group opinion evolution. The results show that group polarization is easier to form when the initial opinions are in a normal distribution, and group polarization will also form under the impact of initial minority agents with extreme opinions. Different network structures will pose different effects on the group opinion evolution, and group polarization is easier to form in the small-world network and BA scale-free network. In addition, opinion leader also affects the group opinion evolution, and it will hinder the generation of group polarization.