Ideologically Motivated Biases in a Multiple Issues Opinion Model

TL;DR

This paper extends a Bayesian opinion model to multiple issues, showing that ideological trust mechanisms lead to more internally consistent opinions and reduce opinion spread.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-issue extension of a Bayesian opinion model and explores how ideological trust influences opinion coherence and diversity.

Findings

Ideological trust reduces opinion spread.

Multi-issue modeling enhances opinion consistency.

Trust based on average opinions impacts opinion dynamics.

Abstract

It has been observed people tend to have opinions that are far more internally consistent than it would be reasonable to expect. Here, we study how that observation might emerge from changing how agents trust the opinions of their peers in a model for opinion dynamics with multiple issues. A previous Bayesian inspired opinion model for continuous opinions is extended to include multiple issues. In the original model, agents tended to trust less opinions that were too different from their own. We investigate the properties of the extended model in its natural form. And we also introduce the possibility the trust of the agent might depend not only on the specific issue but on the average opinions over the many issues. By adopting such a ideological point of view, we observe an important decrease in the spread of individual opinions.