THE EFFECT OF IN-GROUP FAVORITISM ON THE COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR OF INDIVIDUALS' OPINIONS

Meysam Alizadeh (), Claudio Cioffi-Revilla () and Andrew Crooks
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Meysam Alizadeh: Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA;
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla: Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA;
Andrew Crooks: Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA;

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2015, vol. 18, issue 01n02, 1-26

Abstract: Empirical findings from social psychology show that sometimes people show favoritism toward in-group members in order to reach a global consensus, even against individuals' own preferences (e.g., altruistically or deontically). Here we integrate ideas and findings on in-group favoritism, opinion dynamics, and radicalization using an agent-based model entitled cooperative bounded confidence (CBC). We investigate the interplay of homophily, rejection, and in-group cooperation drivers on the formation of opinion clusters and the emergence of extremist, radical opinions. Our model is the first to explicitly explore the effect of in-group favoritism on the macro-level, collective behavior of opinions. We compare our model against the two-dimentional bounded confidence model with rejection mechanism, proposed by Huetet al.[Adv. Complex Syst.13(3) (2010) 405–423], and find that the number of opinion clusters and extremists is reduced in our model. Moreover, results show that group influence can never dominate homophilous and rejecting encounters in the process of opinion cluster formation. We conclude by discussing implications of our model for research on collective behavior of opinions emerging from individuals' interaction.

Keywords: Opinion dynamics; in-group favoritism; homophily; radicalization; extremism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525915500022

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