An Exploration of Drivers of Opinion Dynamics

Els Weinans (), George van Voorn (), Patrick Steinmann (), Elisa Perrone () and Ahmadreza Marandi ()
Additional contact information
Els Weinans: https://www.uu.nl/staff/EWeinans

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2024, vol. 27, issue 1, 5

Abstract: Our ability to deal with external changes is determined by our collective willingness to transform and adopt new technologies. These factors are driven by people's opinion on the change itself and the proposed policies. Humans constantly update their opinion by integrating new information they hear with their values, which help them make a judgement about that new information. Here, we create an agent-based model that explicitly incorporates the concept of values to explore possible drivers of opinion dynamics. In the model, we explore several factors and perform local and global sensitivity analysis to test their individual and interaction effects. We find that consensus formation in the model is mainly determined by factors related to (1) the amount of stochasticity in the opinion updating procedure and (2) the relative ease with which old links are removed and new links are created. Our results demonstrate how opinions and values may co-evolve. Furthermore, they may help in understanding human responses to new policies such as covid-related restrictions or calls to shift to a more plant-based diet.

Keywords: Opinion Dynamics; Polarization; Sensitivity Analysis; Uncertainty; Values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-01-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.jasss.org/27/1/5/5.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:2022-68-3

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 ().