TY - JOUR
T1 - Enhanced ability of information gathering may intensify disagreement among groups
AU - Sayama, Hiroki
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant No. 19K21571 and the Visitors Program of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.
PY - 2020/7
Y1 - 2020/7
N2 - Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here we show that widening disagreement among groups may be linked to the advancement of information communication technology by analyzing a mathematical model of population dynamics in a continuous opinion space. We adopted the interaction kernel approach to model enhancement of people's information-gathering ability and introduced a generalized nonlocal gradient as individuals' perception kernel. We found that the characteristic distance between population peaks becomes greater as the wider range of opinions becomes available to individuals or the more attention is attracted to opinions distant from theirs. These findings may provide a possible explanation for why disagreement is growing in today's increasingly interconnected society, without attributing its cause only to specific individuals or events.
AB - Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here we show that widening disagreement among groups may be linked to the advancement of information communication technology by analyzing a mathematical model of population dynamics in a continuous opinion space. We adopted the interaction kernel approach to model enhancement of people's information-gathering ability and introduced a generalized nonlocal gradient as individuals' perception kernel. We found that the characteristic distance between population peaks becomes greater as the wider range of opinions becomes available to individuals or the more attention is attracted to opinions distant from theirs. These findings may provide a possible explanation for why disagreement is growing in today's increasingly interconnected society, without attributing its cause only to specific individuals or events.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevE.102.012303
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevE.102.012303
M3 - Article
C2 - 32795023
AN - SCOPUS:85089552940
VL - 102
JO - Physical Review E - Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics
JF - Physical Review E - Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics
SN - 1063-651X
IS - 1
M1 - 012303
ER -