Memory and Personality in Ideological Polarization: The Politico-physics of Mnemomatter

Abstract

We used physical agents with deep memories of past events and left/right ideologies but different fixed personalities to study what drives the polarization of the dynamic population ideology. We find that agents have a critical memory depth below which complete ideology polarization of the collective cannot occur and above which it is inevitable. However, depending on the details of the personalities, the ideologies polarization can be static or dynamic in time, even chaotic. Thus, agents with different personalities and levels of memory (mnemomatter) can serve as a physics analogue of the ideology dynamics among ideological beings, illuminating how decisions influenced by individual memories of past interactions can shape and influence subsequent ideology polarization. Each constituent agent harbors a private stack memory and an onboard microcomputer/controller which both measures and controls its physical spin handedness, which is a proxy for ideology. The agent's decision to change or retain its current spin is determined by each agent's private algorithm for decisions (the personality) and the time-weighted stack history of present and previous interactions. Depending on a given agent's personality for evaluating its memory and experiences, an agent can act as a curmudgeon who never changes its ideology, a pushover who always accepts change, a contrarian who always does the opposite of what is expected, an opportunist who weighs recent events more heavily than past events in making decisions, and a traditionalist who weighs past events more heavily than recent events in decision making. We develop a field theory which maps agent ideological polarization over into a dynamic potential landscape. Perhaps such applications of physics-based systems to political systems will help us to understand the ideological instability observed in the world today.