Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: DIAL, A Dialogical Model for Opinion Dynamics

Abstract

We present DIAL, a model of group dynamics and opinion dynamics. It features dialogues, in which agents gamble about reputation points. Intra-group radicalisation of opinions appears to be an emergent phenomenon. We position this model within the theoretical literature on opinion dynamics and social influence. Moreover, we investigate the effect of argumentation on group structure by simulation experiments. We compare runs of the model with varying influence of the outcome of debates on the reputation of the agents.

Social Simulation in the Social Sciences

“…Similarly, Granovetter’s model of threshold behavior (Granovetter, 1978) and subsequent developments (e.g., Watts, 1999, 2002) showed that, when individuals make binary decisions, such as signing a declaration of war, evading taxes, or reporting bullying by a supervisor within a workplace, nonlinear interaction effects can result in unpredictable social outcomes, especially when individuals are sensitive to behavior of others and are embedded in social network structures. In the same vein, Deffuant, Amblard, Weisbuch, and Faure (2002) and Hegselmann and Krause (2002) examined the role of social influence on opinion distribution and dynamics and showed that societies can converge toward polarized or pluriform collective opinions (Huet, Deffuant, & Jager, 2008; Jager & Amblard, 2004), minority positions may become dominant (Galam, 2002), and reputable leaders emerge as a result of social interaction (Dykstra, Elsenbroich, Jager, Renardel de Lavalette, & Verbrugge, 2013). These social simulation studies show that large-scale societal changes may originate from many micro-level interactions and that even unique historic events with significant societal consequences can be partly explained in terms of complex social interaction.…”

Cognitive perspectives on opinion dynamics: the role of knowledge in consensus formation, opinion divergence, and group polarization

“…However, many of these models also assume bounded influence, which raises the question of how easily network connectivity alone can produce opinion divergence. Similarly, the DIAL model [56] provides means for isolating and segregating communities via a number of comparison and communication processes.…”

“…For example, researchers have considered emotion [90,91]; social network connections [92,93]; and argumentation and dialog [56]. In addition, a number of richer representations of opinion have been examined.…”

“…In addition, a number of richer representations of opinion have been examined. For example, a number of models have emerged that use a 2-dimensional or multi-dimensional continuous opinion vector [56,[94][95][96][97]. Although such spatial or geometric knowledge representations are not unknown in the memory and psychological literature (notable, the LSA model of [98]), [99] leveled a famous criticism against such geometric models of knowledge representation, favoring a feature-based approach.…”

“…For models of opinion dynamics to make richer and more useful predictions, they may need to incorporate all these factors. Recent agent-based modeling has attempted to incorporate many of these factors [56], and other social/psychological factors including norms, emotion, social comparison, segmented networks, etc. have been examined as well [90,91,117].…”