• Open Access

Enhanced ability of information gathering may intensify disagreement among groups

Hiroki Sayama
Phys. Rev. E 102, 012303 – Published 2 July 2020

Abstract

Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here we show that widening disagreement among groups may be linked to the advancement of information communication technology by analyzing a mathematical model of population dynamics in a continuous opinion space. We adopted the interaction kernel approach to model enhancement of people's information-gathering ability and introduced a generalized nonlocal gradient as individuals' perception kernel. We found that the characteristic distance between population peaks becomes greater as the wider range of opinions becomes available to individuals or the more attention is attracted to opinions distant from theirs. These findings may provide a possible explanation for why disagreement is growing in today's increasingly interconnected society, without attributing its cause only to specific individuals or events.

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  • Received 14 March 2020
  • Accepted 15 June 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.012303

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Interdisciplinary PhysicsNonlinear DynamicsPhysics of Living Systems

Authors & Affiliations

Hiroki Sayama*

  • Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000, USA; Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, 01187 Dresden, Germany; and Waseda Innovation Lab, Waseda University, Shinjuku, Tokyo 169-8050, Japan

  • *sayama@binghamton.edu; http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/∼sayama/

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Issue

Vol. 102, Iss. 1 — July 2020

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