A Hybrid Opinion Formation and Polarization Model

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a great number of opinion formation models that depict the evolution of opinions within a social group and make predictions about the evolution process. In the traditional formulation of opinion evolution such as the DeGroot model, an agent’s opinion is represented as a real number and updated by taking a weighted average of its neighbour’s opinions. In this paper, we adopt a hybrid representation of opinions that integrate both the discrete and continuous nature of an opinion. Basically, an agent has a ‘Yes’, ‘Neutral’ or ‘No’ opinion on some issues of interest and associates with its Yes opinion a support degree which captures how strongly it supports the opinion. With such a rich representation, not only can we study the evolution of opinion but also that of support degree. After all, an agent’s opinion can stay the same but become more or less supportive of it. Changes in the support degree are progressive in nature and only a sufficient accumulation of such a progressive change will result in a change of opinion say from Yes to No. Hence, in our formulation, after an agent interacts with another, its support degree is either strengthened or weakened by a predefined amount and a change of opinion may occur as a consequence of such progressive changes. We carry out simulations to evaluate the impacts of key model parameters including (1) the number of agents, (2) the distribution of initial support degrees and (3) the amount of change of support degree changes in a single interaction. Last but not least, we present several extensions to the hybrid and progressive model which lead to opinion polarization.