Modelling Group Opinion Shift to Extreme : the Smooth Bounded Confidence Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new smooth bounded confidence model to simulate opinion shifts to extremes, incorporating empathy, and demonstrates its effectiveness in replicating social psychology phenomena.

Contribution

A novel variant of the bounded confidence model that accounts for opinion shifts to extremes and integrates perspective taking based on social psychology theories.

Findings

Model exhibits shift to the extreme with extremists present.

Incorporating empathy improves alignment with social psychology data.

The model replicates observed opinion dynamics in social groups.

Abstract

We consider the phenomenon of opinion shift to the extreme reported in the social psychology literature. We argue that a good candidate to model this phenomenon can be a new variant of the bounded confidence (BC) model, the smooth BC model which we propose in this paper. This model considers individuals with a continuous opinion and an uncertainty. Individuals interact by random pairs, and attract each other’s opinion proportionally to a Gaussian function of the distance between their opinions. We first show that this model presents a shift to the extreme when we introduce extremists (very convinced individuals with extreme opinions) in the population, even if there is the same number of extremists located at each extreme. This behaviour is similar to the one already identified with other versions of BC model. Then we propose a modification of the smooth BC model to account for the social psychology data and theories related to this phenomenon. The modification is based on the hypothesis of perspective taking (empathy) in the context of consensus seeking.