Evaluation and Control of Opinion Polarization and Disagreement: A Review

Abstract

With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and disagreement in the social network. There have been a lot of reviews on modeling opinion formation. However, less attention has been paid to opinion polarization and disagreement.Design/methodology/approach: In this work, we review recent advances in opinion polarization and disagreement and pay attention to how they are evaluated and controlled.Findings: In literature, three metrics: polarization, disagreement, and polarizationdisagreement index (PDI) are usually adopted, and there is a tradeoff between polarization and disagreement. Different strategies have been proposed in literature which can significantly control opinion polarization and disagreement based on these metrics.Originality/value: This review is of crucial importance to summarize works on opinion polarization and disagreement, and to the better understanding and control of them.