The Complexity of Social Polarization: Connecting Individual Opinions and Societal Dynamics with Agent-Based Models and Experiments

Abstract

Recently, many societies seem to shift towards more polarization and volatility in opinions, for example in attitudes about immigration or climate change. Underlying reasons of this development are hard to unravel. A key obstacle is that opinion dynamics in society involve a complex micro-macro interaction between interpersonal processes, meso-level conditions such as network structures, and macro-level outcomes, such as polarization in opinion distributions. Agent-based simulation models (ABM) offer powerful tools to address this challenge. Different types of ABM will be presented that demonstrate how and under which conditions polarization and intergroup animosity could arise as unintended result of fundamental and prevalent interpersonal processes, for example homophily and social influence. Drawing on recent research, it will then be shown how competing models of polarization dynamics can be compared and informed with data from lab experiments and social network studies.