Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 8: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Formation II

SOE 8.1: Talk

Monday, April 1, 2019, 17:15–17:30, H17

Towards realistic models for social feedback in opinion dynamics — •Felix Gaisbauer, Sven Banisch, and Eckehard Olbrich — Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

In [1] a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics based was proposed, which was based on social positive or negative feedback on expressed opinions. We showed that the opinion dynamics can be described as reinforcement learning in a coordination game and derived the structural condition on the network - the existence of more than one cohesive set - for the co-existence of different opinions in the network. In the present work we extend the approach by introducing costs for opinion expression, which means that opinions are only expressed if the agents are sufficiently convinced. Therefore, not every agent will express her opinion. Moreover, agents learn not only by the feedback on their expressed opinions, but also by the opinions expressed by others. We study how these additions affect polarization in different networks. Furthermore, we show that in this case - contrary to the original model - a small cohesive group of strongly convinced agents can convince a larger group of less convinced agents with an initially different opinion.

[1] S. Banisch & E. Olbrich (2018) Opinion polarization by learning from social feedback, The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, DOI: 10.1080/0022250X.2018.1517761