The building up of individual inflexibility in opinion dynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a more realistic opinion dynamics model by allowing individual inflexibility to emerge from repeated updates, showing how agents' inflexibility varies and influences public debate outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model combining GUF and CODA, where inflexibility is an emergent property based on accumulated opinion strength, rather than a fixed trait.

Findings

Inflexibility varies as a continuous function of opinion strength.

Agents can shift inflexibility between opposing choices.

Model predicts outcomes of public debates based on individual inflexibility dynamics.

Abstract

Two models of opinion dynamics are entangled in order to build a more realistic model of inflexibility. The first one is the Galam Unifying Frame (GUF), which incorporates rational and inflexible agents, and the other one considers the combination of Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA). While initially in GUF, inflexibility is a fixed given feature of an agent, it is now the result of an accumulation for a given agent who makes the same choice through repeated updates. Inflexibility thus emerges as an internal property of agents becoming a continuous function of the strength of its opinion. Therefore an agent can be more or less inflexible and can shift from inflexibility along one choice to inflexibility along the opposite choice. These individual dynamics of the building up and falling off of an agent inflexibility are driven by the successive local updates of the associated individual opinions. New results are obtained and discussed in terms of predicting outcomes of public debates.