The role of homophily in the emergence of opinion controversies

TL;DR

This paper models how homophily influences social network structures and opinion dynamics, revealing that while homophily can promote consensus, it also fosters polarization when combined with media influence.

Contribution

It introduces a network model with tunable homophily, analyzes its impact on community formation and opinion consensus, and examines the interplay with media influence.

Findings

Higher homophily leads to stronger community structures.

Homophily can facilitate consensus contrary to common beliefs.

Media influence combined with homophily results in polarized opinion clusters.

Abstract

Understanding the emergence of strong controversial issues in modern societies is a key issue in opinion studies. A commonly diffused idea is the fact that the increasing of homophily in social networks, due to the modern ICT, can be a driving force for opinion polariation. In this paper we address the problem with a modelling approach following three basic steps. We first introduce a network morphogenesis model to reconstruct network structures where homophily can be tuned with a parameter. We show that as homophily increases the emergence of marked topological community structures in the networks raises. Secondly, we perform an opinion dynamics process on homophily dependent networks and we show that, contrary to the common idea, homophily helps consensus formation. Finally, we introduce a tunable external media pressure and we show that, actually, the combination of homophily and media makes the media effect less effective and leads to strongly polarized opinion clusters.