Biased Information and Opinion Polarisation

Richard M. H. Suen

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Why do people form polarised opinions after receiving the same information? Why does disagreement persist even when public information is abundant? We show that a Bayesian model with potentially biased public signals can answer these questions. When agents are uncertain and disagree about the bias in the signals, persistent disagreement and opinion polarisation can readily emerge. This happens because uncertainty surrounding the bias Induces agents with diverse initial beliefs to form drastically different posterior estimates. Prolonged exposure to these signals can in some cases drive the agents' opinions further away from each other and also further away from the truth.

Keywords: Bayesian Learning; Biased Signals; Disagreement; Opinion Polarisation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/124953/1/MPRA_paper_124953.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:124953

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().