Mobility and social network effects on extremist opinions.
Understanding the emergence of extreme opinions and in what kind of environment they might become less extreme is a central theme in our modern globalized society. A model combining continuous opinions and observed discrete actions (CODA) capable of addressing the important issue of measuring how extreme opinions might be has been recently proposed. In this paper I show extreme opinions to arise in a ubiquitous manner in the CODA model for a multitude of social network structures. Depending on network details reducing extremism seems to be possible. However, a large number of agents with extreme opinions is always observed. A significant decrease in the number of extremists can be observed by allowing agents to change their positions in the network.
GRIFE-EACH, Universidade de São Paulo, Av. Arlindo Bétio, 1000, 03828-080 São Paulo, Brazil. amartins@usp.br
André C R
AC
Martins