How does public opinion become extreme?

Abstract

We investigate the emergence of extreme opinion trends in society by employing statistical physics modeling and analysis on polls that inquire about a wide range of issues such as religion, economics, politics, abortion, extramarital sex, books, movies, and electoral vote. The surveys lay out a clear indicator of the rise of extreme views. The precursor is a nonlinear relation between the fraction of individuals holding a certain extreme view and the fraction of individuals that includes also moderates, e.g., in politics, those who are "very conservative" versus "moderate to very conservative" ones. We propose an activation model of opinion dynamics with interaction rules based on the existence of individual "stubbornness" that mimics empirical observations. According to our modeling, the onset of nonlinearity can be associated to an abrupt bootstrap-percolation transition with cascades of extreme views through society. Therefore, it represents an early-warning signal to forecast the transition from moderate to extreme views. Moreover, by means of a phase diagram we can classify societies according to the percolative regime they belong to, in terms of critical fractions of extremists and people's ties.

28 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (18)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Identification of influential spreaders in complex networks
• Minority Opinion Spreading in Random Geometry
• Dynamics of Majority Rule
• Laws of Population Growth
• Searching for superspreaders of information in real-world social media
• The role of inflexible minorities in the breaking of democratic opinion dynamics
• Spreading dynamics in complex networks
• Rational Group Decision Making. A random field Ising model at T=0
• Bootstrap Percolation on Complex Networks
• k-core (bootstrap) percolation on complex networks: Critical phenomena and nonlocal effects
• Large cities are less green
• Disorder induced phase transition in kinetic models of opinion dynamics
• Heterogeneous-k-core versus Bootstrap Percolation on Complex Networks
• Threshold-limited spreading in social networks with multiple initiators
• From Social Data Mining to Forecasting Socio-Economic Crisis
• Role of conviction in nonequilibrium models of opinion formation
• Public debates driven by incomplete scientific data: the cases of evolution theory, global warming and H1N1 pandemic influenza

Cited by in corpus (26)

• Active Sensing of Social Networks
• Threshold $q$-voter model
• Three-state opinion dynamics in modular networks
• Clout, Activists and Budget: The Road to Presidency
• Symmetry breaking by heating in a continuous opinion model
• Consequences of nonconformist behaviors in a continuous opinion model
• Role of the plurality rule in multiple choices
• Cross-Issue Solidarity and Truth Convergence in Opinion Dynamics
• Modeling the dynamics of dissent
• Adaptive network approach for emergence of societal bubbles
• Imperfect bifurcations in opinion dynamics under external fields
• Evidence of Fraud in Brazil's Electoral Campaigns Via the Benford's Law
• Effects of Time Horizons on Influence Maximization in the Voter Dynamics
• Impact of network randomness on multiple opinion dynamics
• Zealotry and Influence Maximization in the Voter Model: When to Target Zealots?
• Information Evolution in Complex Networks
• Emergence of moderate opinions as a consequence of group pressure
• Opinion Dynamics on Networks under Correlated Disordered External Perturbations
• How fear of future outcomes affects social dynamics
• A Hierarchy of Linear Threshold Models for the Spread of Political Revolutions on Social Networks
• Can Spatiality Promote Diversity?
• The role of zealots in the spread of linguistic traits
• Community Structure Recovery and Interaction Probability Estimation for Gossip Opinion Dynamics
• From Symbols to Embeddings: A Tale of Two Representations in Computational Social Science
• Phase transition in the diffusion and bootstrap percolation models on regular random and Erdős-Rényi networks
• Modified Axelrod Model Showing Opinion Convergence And Polarization In Realistic Scale-Free Networks