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When Pull Turns to Shove: A Continuous-Time Model for Opinion Dynamics
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- arXiv, 2020.
-
Abstract
- Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions within a continuously distributed population. We utilize a network-free system of determining political influence and a local-attraction, distal-repulsion dynamic for reaction to perceived content. Our approach allows for the incorporation of intergroup bias such that messages from trusted in-group sources enjoy greater leeway than out-group ones. We are able to extrapolate these nonlinear microscopic dynamics to macroscopic population distributions by using probabilistic functions representing biased environments. The framework we put forward can reproduce real-world political distributions and experimentally observed dynamics, and is amenable to further refinement as more data becomes available.<br />Comment: Main text and appendices: 14 pages including references, with 11 figures
- Subjects :
- education.field_of_study
Physics - Physics and Society
Tribalism
Population
Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
FOS: Physical sciences
Time model
Consonance and dissonance
Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
Dynamical Systems (math.DS)
Politics
Opinion dynamics
FOS: Biological sciences
FOS: Mathematics
Sociology
Positive economics
Mathematics - Dynamical Systems
education
Quantitative Biology - Populations and Evolution
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....54bb71da4aa2f867cd9cbca8b019e024
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2005.05478