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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 16: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Dynamics

SOE 16.3: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 20. März 2024, 16:00–16:15, MA 001

Accelerated consensus and stable dissent in projected argument-based opinion dynamics — •Sven Banisch and Joris Wessels — Karlsruhe Institute for Technology

This contribution reports on a first exercise to project an opinion model with psychologic depth onto continuous opinion dynamics. In the argument model, agents exchange arguments, or beliefs, and form their opinion based on evaluations of them. In continuous opinion dynamics, agents have only opinions that adapt in interaction with other opinions. Here we study which dynamics are implied by explicit argument exchange with confirmation bias on the space of continuous models. We were surprised by this exercise, because some things we had not anticipated emerged. While it was expected that consensus forms quickly in the projected, but not in the explicit model, we did not expect that the meta-stable state of polarization would stabilize after projection. Qualifying model outcomes by their convergence properties may capture differences between models more than their phenomenological similarities. With psychological depth, the transient becomes relevant. We discuss implications for coupled models, in which opinion dynamics is included in a disease or climate model, and where reducing model complexity is highly desirable for computational reasons as well as for a systematic understanding of different model classes.

Keywords: opinion dynamics; coupled models; model translation; complexity reduction; meta-stability