The interplay between conformity and anticonformity and its polarizing effect on society
Patryk Siedlecki, Janusz Szwabi\'nski, Tomasz Weron

TL;DR
This paper investigates how the interaction between conformity within communities and anticonformity between communities can lead to societal polarization, using an agent-based model on a segmented network.
Contribution
It introduces a novel agent-based model combining conformity and anticonformity on a double-clique network to explain polarization mechanisms.
Findings
Interplay between intra-clique conformity and inter-clique anticonformity causes polarization.
A phase transition is controlled by the fraction of cross-links between communities.
Segmentation alone does not guarantee polarization; antagonistic interactions are necessary.
Abstract
Simmering debates leading to polarization are observed in many domains. Although empirical findings show a strong correlation between this phenomenon and modularity of a social network, still little is known about the actual mechanisms driving communities to conflicting opinions. In this paper, we used an agent-based model to check if the polarization may be induced by a competition between two types of social response: conformity and anticonformity. The proposed model builds on the q-voter model (Castellano et al. 2009b) and uses a double-clique topology in order to capture segmentation of a community. Our results indicate that the interplay between intra-clique conformity and inter-clique anticonformity may indeed lead to a polarized state of the entire system. We have found a dynamic phase transition controlled by the fraction of cross-links between cliques. In the regime of…
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