Stubborn extremism as a potential pathway to group polarization
Abstract
Group polarization is the widely-observed phenomenonin which the opinions held by members of a small groupbecome more extreme after the group discusses a topic.For example, conservative individuals become even moreconservative, while liberal individuals become even moreliberal. Social psychologists have offered competing ex-planations for this phenomenon. These typically re-quire questionable assumptions about human psychol-ogy. Here, we posit a more parsimonious explanation:the stubbornness of extreme opinions. Using agent-based modeling, we demonstrate that such “stubbornextremism” gives rise to group polarization, as well asother trends observed across the literature on polariza-tion. Our study revealed a further methodological prob-lem for the study of group polarization: reporting opin-ions as categories (e.g. on a Likert scale) inflates theobserved increase in opinion extremity. We concludewith a call for deeper integration of opinion dynamicsmodeling with the cognitive science of communicationand influence.