School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore.
School of Physics and Materials Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China.
Chaos. 2020 Oct;30(10):103110. doi: 10.1063/5.0009943.
Emergence of extremism in social networks is among the most appealing topics of opinion dynamics in computational sociophysics in recent decades. Most of the existing studies presume that the initial existence of certain groups of opinion extremities and the intrinsic stubbornness in individuals' characteristics are the key factors allowing the tenacity or even prevalence of such extreme opinions. We propose a modification to the consensus making in bounded-confidence models where two interacting individuals holding not so different opinions tend to reach a consensus by adopting an intermediate opinion of their previous ones. We show that if individuals make biased compromises, extremism may still arise without a need of an explicit classification of extremists and their associated characteristics. With such biased consensus making, several clusters of diversified opinions are gradually formed up in a general trend of shifting toward the extreme opinions close to the two ends of the opinion range, which may allow extremism communities to emerge and moderate views to be dwindled. Furthermore, we assume stronger compromise bias near opinion extremes. It is found that such a case allows moderate opinions a greater chance to survive compared to that of the case where the bias extent is universal across the opinion space. As to the extreme opinion holders' lower tolerances toward different opinions, which arguably may exist in many real-life social systems, they significantly decrease the size of extreme opinion communities rather than helping them to prevail. Brief discussions are presented on the significance and implications of these observations in real-life social systems.
社交网络中的极端主义的出现是近几十年来计算社会物理学中意见动态最吸引人的话题之一。大多数现有研究都假定，某些极端意见群体的初始存在和个体特征中的内在固执是允许这种极端意见顽强存在甚至流行的关键因素。我们提出了一种对有界置信模型中的共识形成的修改，其中两个持有不太不同意见的相互作用的个体通过采用他们之前的中间意见倾向于达成共识。我们表明，如果个体做出有偏差的妥协，即使不需要对极端主义者及其相关特征进行明确分类，极端主义也可能出现。通过这种有偏差的共识形成，在向接近意见范围两端的极端意见逐渐转移的总体趋势下，几个多元化意见的集群逐渐形成，这可能允许极端主义社区的出现和温和观点的减少。此外，我们假设在意见极端附近存在更强的妥协偏差。结果发现，与偏差程度在整个意见空间中普遍存在的情况相比，这种情况下温和观点有更大的生存机会。至于极端意见持有者对不同意见的较低容忍度，这在许多现实生活中的社会系统中可能存在，它们显著减小了极端意见社区的规模，而不是帮助它们占主导地位。简短的讨论提出了这些观察在现实生活中的社会系统中的意义和影响。
