The Importance of Disagreeing: Contrarians and Extremism in the CODA model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how introducing contrarians into the CODA opinion dynamics model affects election outcomes and extremism, showing that contrarians weaken extremism and reduce hung election scenarios.

Contribution

It demonstrates that contrarians can mitigate extremism and reduce the likelihood of hung elections in the CODA model of opinion dynamics.

Findings

Contrarians weaken extremism in the model.

Contrarians reduce the frequency of hung elections.

The presence of contrarians influences opinion polarization.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the effects of introducing contrarians in a model of Opinion Dynamics where the agents have internal continuous opinions, but exchange information only about a binary choice that is a function of their continuous opinion, the CODA model. We observe that the hung election scenario still exists here, but it is weaker and it shouldn't be expected in every election. Finally, we also show that the introduction of contrarians make the tendency towards extremism of the original model weaker, indicating that the existence of agents that prefer to disagree might be an important aspect and help society to diminish extremist opinions.