Repulsive Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics in Polarized Communities

Abstract: Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion dynamics is bounded-confidence models. In these models, individuals are influenced by the opinions of others in their network. They generally assume that individuals will formulate their opinions to resemble those of their peers. In this paper, inspired by the dynamics of partisan politics, we introduce a bounded-confidence model in which individuals may be repelled by the opinions of their peers rather than only attracted to them. We prove convergence properties of our model and perform simulations to study the behavior of our model on various types of random networks. In particular, we observe that including opinion repulsion leads to a higher degree of opinion fragmentation than in standard bounded-confidence models.