Identity Drives Polarization: Advancing the Hegselmann-Krause Model by Identity Groups

František Kalvas, Ashwin Ramaswamy, Michael D. Slater

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In this article we describe an Agent-Based Model that extends the Hegselmann-Krause model of opinion dynamics to study the role of social identity in opinion polarization. In our model, an agent’s social identity is a function of two things—the agent’s opinion in relation to those of the other agents, and the observer’s sensitivity to the tightness of clustering. We implement this by first selecting a subset of the agent population that are deemed to have close neighbors, and then using Louvain community detection to find identity groups. At every time step, agents only consider the opinions of other agents within their identity group that also fall within their Hegselmann-Krause opinion boundary, ε. We show that our dynamic implementation of social identity systematically modulates the relationship between average ε and polarization.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Social Simulation - Proceedings of the 17th Social Simulation Conference, European Social Simulation Association
EditorsFlaminio Squazzoni
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media B.V.
Pages249-262
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783031349195
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event17th annual conference of European Social Simulation Association, ESSA 2022 - Milan, Italy
Duration: Sep 12 2022Sep 16 2022

Publication series

NameSpringer Proceedings in Complexity
ISSN (Print)2213-8684
ISSN (Electronic)2213-8692

Conference

Conference17th annual conference of European Social Simulation Association, ESSA 2022
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityMilan
Period09/12/2209/16/22

Keywords

  • Bounded confidence model
  • Dynamic identity
  • Polarization

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