Opinion Polarization in Human Communities Can Emerge as a Natural Consequence of Beliefs Being Interrelated

Abstract

The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities—the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics—has been a focus of interest for decades, both from theoretical and modelling points of view. Regarding modelling attempts, an entire scientific field—opinion dynamics—has emerged in order to study this and related phenomena. Within this framework, agents’ opinions are usually represented by a scalar value which undergoes modification due to interaction with other agents. Under certain conditions, these models are able to reproduce polarization—a state increasingly familiar to our everyday experience. In the present paper, an alternative explanation is suggested along with its corresponding model. More specifically, we demonstrate that by incorporating the following two well-known human characteristics into the representation of agents: (1) in the human brain beliefs are interconnected, and (2) people strive to maintain a coherent belief system; polarization immediately occurs under exposure to news and information. Furthermore, the model accounts for the proliferation of fake news, and shows how opinion polarization is related to various cognitive biases.

Keywords

• belief systems
• opinion polarization
• belief system dynamics
• fake news
• cognitive biases
• opinion dynamics