Intergroup Conflict Escalation Leads to More Extremism

Meysam Alizadeh (), Alin Coman (), Michael Lewis () and Claudio Cioffi-Revilla ()
Additional contact information
Meysam Alizadeh: http://malizad.github.io/
Alin Coman: https://psych.princeton.edu/psychology/research/acoman/index.php
Michael Lewis: http://www.pitt.edu/~cmlewis/

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2014, vol. 17, issue 4, 4

Abstract: Empirical findings in the intergroup conflict literature show that individuals’ beliefs that mark differentiation from out-groups become radicalized as intergroup tensions escalate. They also show that this differentiation is proportional to tension escalation. In this paper, we are interested to develop an agent-based model which captures these findings in order to explore the effect of perceived intergroup conflict escalation on the average number of emergent extremists and opinion clusters in the population. The proposed model builds on the 2-dimensional bounded confidence model proposed by Huet et al (2008). The results show that the average number of extremists has a negative correlation with intolerance threshold and positive correlation with the amount of opinion movement when two agents are to reject each other’s belief. In other words, the more tensions exist between groups, the more individuals getting extremists. We also found that intergroup conflict escalation leads to lower opinion diversity in the population compared with normal situations.

Keywords: Intergroup Conflict; Opinion Dynamics; Differentiation; Bounded Confidence; Extremism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10-31
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.jasss.org/17/4/4/4.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jas:jasssj:2012-46-4

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation from Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesco Renzini ().