Opinion Formation Model Including Pressure and Silence Caused by Inconsistency

Abstract

People often belong to multiple communities and accommodate themselves to majority opinion in each community. Thus, they sometimes express different and occasionally inconsistent opinions in the individual communities. When the inconsistency in opinion is uncovered, she/he may be criticized, and then, quit expressing opinions. Recently inconsistency in opinion is easily uncovered because of the growth of communication tools, e.g. SNS. Therefore, we investigate the mechanism of quitting expressing opinion because of the criticism of the inconsistency in opinions in social media. We modeled multiple communities as multiplex networks and investigate how opinions are formed and why users quit expressing opinions due to uncovered inconsistency. For this purpose, we first extended a conventional model whose opinion formation mechanism is based on the bounded confidence model. Then we also considered different opinion formation mechanisms and examined opinion formation in different types of multiplex complex networks, in order to adjust more realistic situations.