SKM 2023 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 1: Tutorial: Stochastic Processes of Opinion Formation (joint session SOE/TUT)

SOE 1.3: Tutorial

Sunday, March 26, 2023, 17:30–18:15, HSZ 02

How growing connectivity and self-organization changes opinion dynamics — •Philipp Lorenz-Spreen — Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

Information technology has made various aspects of our lives more dynamic and self-organized. Connections with others can be made across spatial and socio-demographic boundaries and undone with the click of a button. Since the famous six degrees of separation, networks seem much more connected; Facebook reports 3.5 degrees of separation on its friendship graph. Yet there have been repeated reports of segregated, homophilic network structures and related trends of increasing polarization on most online platforms. The mechanism that could resolve this apparent paradox may lie behind the question of whether we change our opinions according to our friends or whether we change our friends according to our opinions. We have recently proposed that an agent’s opinion changes as a process of mutual reinforcement within clusters of shared attitudes and a coevolution of the associated network structure that dynamically adapts to changing opinions and follows a probability distribution governed by homophily. This combination helps explain the potential emergence of increasing polarization even as connectivity increases. Moreover, extending this model to multiple dimensions of topics can explain the empirical observation of increasing alignment of issues, where opinions become increasingly correlated within ideological clusters.