Public Opinion Polarization by Individual Revenue from the Social Preference Theory

Abstract

Social conflicts occur frequently during the social transition period and the polarization of public opinion happens occasionally. By introducing the social preference theory, the target of this paper is to reveal the micro-interaction mechanism of public opinion polarization. Firstly, we divide the social preferences of Internet users (network nodes) into three categories: egoistic, altruistic, and fair preferences, and adopt the revenue function to define the benefits obtained by individuals with different preferences among their interaction process so as to analyze their decision-making behaviors driven by the revenue. Secondly, the revenue function is used to judge the exit rules of nodes in a network, and then a dynamic network of spreading public opinion with the node (individual) exit mechanism is built based on a BA scale-free network. Subsequently, the influences of different social preferences, as well as individual revenue on the effect of public opinion polarization, are analyzed through simulation experiments. The simulation results show that (1) Different social preferences demonstrate different influences on the evolution of public opinions, (2) Individuals tend to interact with ones with different preferences, (3) The network with a single preference or a high aggregation is more likely to form public opinion polarization. Finally, the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed model are verified by a real case.

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