Impact of Cognitive Dissonance on Social Hysteresis: Insights fromthe Expressed and Private Opinions Model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cognitive dissonance influences social hysteresis within opinion dynamics models, revealing that mitigating dissonance can reduce hysteresis and promote societal consensus, supported by analytical and simulation results.

Contribution

It introduces a new cognitive dissonance mechanism into an opinion model, demonstrating its role in social hysteresis and suggesting strategies for societal change management.

Findings

Cognitive dissonance induces social hysteresis in opinion dynamics.

Mitigating dissonance can reduce hysteresis and facilitate consensus.

The model is validated through analytical methods and Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

The growing interest in models of opinion dynamics, particularly those that distinguish between private beliefs and publicly expressed opinions, spans several academic disciplines, from the social sciences to the hard sciences. They have been developed to study decision-making mechanisms and applied to many social phenomena, such as pluralistic ignorance, the spiral of silence, or preference falsification. Within these models, however, there is a notable gap in the study of social hysteresis, a concept crucial to understanding the delayed responses of societies to the rapid changes of the modern world. This research aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of cognitive dissonance on social hysteresis through an updated model of expressed and private opinions (EPOs). We study the model both analytically and through Monte Carlo simulations. To facilitate understanding and replication of our model, and to provide a resource for further exploration to a diverse interdisciplinary audience, we have made the special NetLogo implementation of the model publicly available at GitHub. By incorporating a cognitive dissonance mitigation mechanism into an agent-based q-voter-type model of Expressed and Private Opinions (EPOs), we demonstrate that this mechanism induces social hysteresis. Consequently, we argue that refraining from rationalizing publicly expressed opinions could mitigate social hysteresis and facilitate consensus, offering insights into potential strategies for managing societal responses to change.