The Role of Mistrust in the Modelling of Opinion Adoption

Abstract

Societies tend to partition into factions based on shared beliefs, leading to sectarian conflict in society. This paper investigatesmistrust as a cause for this partitioningby extending an establishedopiniondynamics model with Bayesian updating that specifies mistrust as the underlying mechanism for disagreement and, ultimately, polarisation. We demonstrate that mistrust is at the foundation of polarisation. Detailed analysis and the results of rigorous simulation studies provide new insight into the potential role ofmistrust in polarisation. We show that consensus results whenmistrust levels are low, but introducing extreme agentsmakes consensus significantly harder to reach and highly fragmented and dispersed. These results also suggest amethod to verify the model using real-world experimental or observational data empirically.