Modeling Attitude Change from Political Dialogues

Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents’ psychological realism using empirically-motivated rules governing interpersonal influence, commitment to previous beliefs, and conformity in social contexts. Computational experiments establish that these extensions produce three novel results: (a) sustained “strong” diversity of opinions across society, (b) opinion subcultures, and (c) pluralistic ignorance. These phenomena arise from a combination of agents’ intolerance, susceptibility and conformity, with extremist agents and social networks playing important roles. The distribution and dynamics of simulated opinions reproduce two empirical datasets on Americans’ political opinions.