Heterogeneous believes, segregation and extremism in the making of public opinions

TL;DR

This paper models how heterogeneous beliefs and social segregation influence the development of public opinion extremism, showing that class heterogeneity can lead to democratic or dictatorial extremism depending on social dynamics.

Contribution

It extends a dynamic opinion model to include social-cultural classes and segregation, revealing how heterogeneity affects extremism and opinion coexistence.

Findings

Heterogeneous classes tend to produce democratic extremism.

Homogeneous classes can lead to dictatorial extremism.

Segregation can prevent global extremism by maintaining opinion coexistence.

Abstract

The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural class. At each step they are distributed randomly in different groups within their respective class to evolve locally by majority rule. In case of a tie the group adopts either one opinion with respective probabilities k and (1-k). The value of k accounts for the average of individual biases driven by the existence of heterogeneous believes within the corresponding class. It may vary from class to class. The process leads to extremism with a full polarization of each class along either one opinions. For homogeneous classes the extremism can be along the initial minority making it dictatorial. At contrast heterogeneous classes exhibit a more balanced dynamics which results in a democratic extremism. Segregation among subclasses may produce a coexistence of opinions at the class level thus averting global extremism. The existence of contradictory public opinions in similar social-cultural neighborhoods is given a new light.