Resource-Mediated Consensus Formation

TL;DR

This paper models opinion dynamics through a resource-based social game, demonstrating how echo chambers form and exploring methods to disrupt them by altering resource distribution, initial opinions, or adding unwavering agents.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resource-mediated social game model to simulate opinion formation and analyze echo chamber emergence and disruption strategies.

Findings

Echo chambers naturally form in the model.

Resource disparity affects opinion clustering.

Committed agents can prevent echo chamber formation.

Abstract

In social sciences, simulating opinion dynamics to study the interplay between homophily and influence, and the subsequent formation of echo chambers, is of great importance. As such, in this paper we investigate echo chambers by implementing a unique social game in which we spawn in a large number of agents, each assigned one of the two opinions on an issue and a finite amount of influence in the form of a game currency. Agents attempt to have an opinion that is a majority at the end of the game, to obtain a reward also paid in the game currency. At the beginning of each round, a randomly selected agent is selected, referred to as a speaker. The second agent is selected in the radius of speaker influence (which is a set subset of the speaker's neighbors) to interact with the speaker as a listener. In this interaction, the speaker proposes a payoff in the game currency from their personal influence budget to persuade the listener to hold the speaker's opinion in future rounds until chosen listener again. The listener can either choose to accept or reject this payoff to hold the speaker's opinion for future rounds. The listener's choice is informed only by their estimate of global majority opinion through a limited view of the opinions of their neighboring agents. We show that the influence game leads to the formation of "echo chambers," or homogeneous clusters of opinions. We also investigate various scenarios to disrupt the creation of such echo chambers, including the introduction of resource disparity between agents with different opinions, initially preferentially assigning opinions to agents, and the introduction of committed agents, who never change their initial opinion.