{"pk":29491,"title":"Stubborn extremism as a potential pathway to group polarization","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Group polarization is the widely-observed phenomenonin which the opinions held by members of a small groupbecome more extreme after the group discusses a topic.For example, conservative individuals become even moreconservative, while liberal individuals become even moreliberal. Social psychologists have offered competing ex-planations for this phenomenon. These typically re-quire questionable assumptions about human psychol-ogy. Here, we posit a more parsimonious explanation:the stubbornness of extreme opinions. Using agent-based modeling, we demonstrate that such “stubbornextremism” gives rise to group polarization, as well asother trends observed across the literature on polariza-tion. Our study revealed a further methodological prob-lem for the study of group polarization: reporting opin-ions as categories (e.g. on a Likert scale) inflates theobserved increase in opinion extremity. We concludewith a call for deeper integration of opinion dynamicsmodeling with the cognitive science of communicationand influence.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"opinion dynamics; polarization; social in-fluence; agent-based modeling"}],"section":"Social Inference","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gx1q3k8","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Matthew","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Turner","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Paul","middle_name":"E.","last_name":"Smaldino","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Merced","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29491/galley/19351/download/"}]}