Dresden 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 2: Social Systems I

SOE 2.2: Vortrag

Montag, 20. März 2017, 10:15–10:30, GÖR 226

Opinion Dynamics by Learning from Social Feedback — •Sven Banisch and Eckehard Olbrich — Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics. The model is based on the idea that agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. A high support of the favored and therefore expressed opinion in the social environment is treated as a positive social feedback which reinforces the value associated to this opinion. In this paper we concentrate on the model with dyadic communication and encounter probabilities defined by an unweighted, time-homogeneous network. The model captures polarization dynamics more plausibly compared to bounded confidence opinion models and avoids extensive opinion flipping usually present in binary opinion dynamics. We perform systematic simulation experiments to understand the role of network connectivity for the emergence of polarization. We show that the likeliness that an agent adopts an extreme opinion is correlated with its position in the network, which may provide a possibility to assess the validity of the model by comparison with data from real world social network data.