The role of homophily in opinion formation among mobile agents

Abstract

Understanding the evolution and spread of opinions within social groups gives important insight into areas such as public elections and marketing. We are specifically interested in how psychological theories of interpersonal influence may affect how individuals change their opinion through interactions with their peers, and apply Agent-Based Modelling to explore the factors that may affect the emergence of consensus. We investigate the coevolution of opinion and location by extending the Deffuant– Weisbuch bounded confidence opinion model to include mobility inspired by the psychological theories of homophily and dissonance, where agents are attracted or repelled by their neighbours based on the agreement of their opinions. Based on wide experimentation, we characterize the time it takes to converge to a steady state and the local diversity of opinions that results, finding that homophily leads to drastic differences in the nature of consensus. We further extend our mobility model and add noise in order to check the model’s robustness, finding that a number of opinion clusters survive even with high levels of noise.