Collective increase of first impression bias

Abstract

We propose a simple model of first impression bias (FIB), where agents tend to ignore features which contradict their initial view. We consider a population of agents which are all in contact with a media, communicating randomly chosen fea-tures of an object. In some cases, we observe on simulations that FIB is significantly more frequent when the agents interact with each other than when they are only in contact with the media. We design an analytical aggregated model of the global agent-based model behavior, which helps to explain the higher number of FIB due to the interactions. ©2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.