Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 12: Focus Session: Opinion Formation and Voter Models

SOE 12.6: Talk

Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 15:15–15:30, MA 001

Opinion dynamics in a model with multiple issues — •Sven Banisch and Eckehard Olbrich — Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Arguments in a discussion often address different aspects of the issue at stake. But, some of these aspects are also relevant for other issues, which induces correlations between opinions on different issues. Those correlations could originate from factual interdependencies between the considered processes in the world, but they give also rise to ideologies and group identities which can induce further dependencies on their part. Many of the classical models of opinion dynamics studied in sociophysics are not able to address these issues. Drawing upon expectancy-value models in attitude research and the theory of conceptual spaces we developed a multi-level representation of opinions which allows to study of opinion dynamics on multiple interrelated issues. The model is based on three different ingredients: (1) interacting agents align their views regarding the significance of different argumentative domains; (2) different (partially overlapping) sets of these domains are associated with different political issues and an agent's attitude is a function of the importance assigned to the argument domains and their evaluative relevance for the issues; and (3) agents preferentially interact with other agents that hold similar attitudes. We show under which conditions these combined processes give rise to polarization and discuss the role of correlations of attitudes towards multiple political issues in this context.