LABSS (Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation), Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, National Research Council (CNR), Rome, Italy.
Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain.
PLoS One. 2024 Jan 11;19(1):e0296075. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0296075. eCollection 2024.
In the last decades an increasing deal of research has investigated the phenomenon of opinion misperception in human communities and, more recently, in social media. Opinion misperception is the wrong evaluation by community's members of the real distribution of opinions or beliefs about a given topic. In this work we explore the mechanisms giving rise to opinion misperception in social media groups, which are larger than physical ones and have peculiar topological features. By means of numerical simulations, we suggest that the structure of connections of such communities plays indeed a role in distorting the perception of the agents about others' beliefs, but it is essentially an indirect effect. Moreover, we show that the main ingredient that generates misperception is a spiral of silence induced by few, well connected and charismatic agents, which rapidly drives the majority of individuals to stay silent without disclosing their true belief, leading minoritarian opinions to appear more widespread throughout the community.
在过去的几十年里，越来越多的研究调查了人类社区以及最近在社交媒体中存在的观点误解现象。观点误解是指社区成员对特定主题的真实观点或信念分布的错误评估。在这项工作中，我们探索了导致社交媒体群体中观点误解的机制，这些群体比物理群体更大，并且具有特殊的拓扑特征。通过数值模拟，我们提出这些社区的连接结构确实在扭曲参与者对他人信念的感知方面发挥了作用，但这主要是一种间接影响。此外，我们还表明，产生误解的主要因素是由少数几个联系紧密且有魅力的参与者引发的沉默螺旋，它会迅速促使大多数人保持沉默而不透露自己的真实信念，从而导致少数派观点在整个社区中显得更加普遍。
