A Psychologically-Motivated Model of Opinion Change with Applications to American Politics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an agent-based model of opinion change that incorporates psychological realism, demonstrating its ability to replicate diverse opinion phenomena and align with empirical American political opinion data.

Contribution

It extends existing models by integrating empirically-motivated psychological rules, resulting in novel insights into opinion diversity, subcultures, and ignorance in social dynamics.

Findings

Achieves sustained opinion diversity in simulations

Reproduces empirical American political opinion distributions

Identifies roles of extremists and social networks in opinion dynamics

Abstract

Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using empirically-motivated rules governing interpersonal influence, commitment to previous beliefs, and conformity in social contexts. Computational experiments establish that these extensions produce three novel results: (a) sustained strong diversity of opinions within the population, (b) opinion subcultures, and (c) pluralistic ignorance. These phenomena arise from a combination of agents' intolerance, susceptibility and conformity, with extremist agents and social networks playing important roles. The distribution and dynamics of simulated opinions reproduce two empirical datasets on Americans' political opinions.