Bounded confidence model: addressed information maintain diversity of opinions

TL;DR

This paper extends the bounded confidence model by allowing agents to address messages to specific neighbors, which reduces unanimity and helps maintain opinion diversity in a community influenced by media messages.

Contribution

It introduces a neighbor-addressing mechanism in the bounded confidence model, enhancing the model's ability to preserve opinion diversity.

Findings

Addressing messages to neighbors reduces unanimity.

The new mechanism improves collective opinion diversity.

Media messages shape public opinion without bias.

Abstract

A community of agents is subject to a stream of messages, which are represented as points on a plane of issues. Messages are sent by media and by agents themselves. Messages from media shape the public opinion. They are unbiased, i.e. positive and negative opinions on a given issue appear with equal frequencies. In our previous work, the only criterion to receive a message by an agent is if the distance between this message and the ones received earlier does not exceed the given value of the tolerance parameter. Here we introduce a possibility to address a message to a given neighbour. We show that this option reduces the unanimity effect, what improves the collective performance.