How social rewiring preferences bridge polarized communities
Published in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2024
Recently, social debates have been marked by increased polarization of social groups. Such polarization not only implies that groups cannot reach a consensus on fundamental questions but also materializes in more modular social spaces/networks that further amplify the risks of polarization in less polarizing topics. In this paper, we use a computational model to understand how fast and to what extent individual rewiring preferences bridge initially weakly connected communities and how likely it is for them to reach a consensus. We show that homophilic and heterophilic rewiring preferences have different impacts depending on the type of opinion spread and only a mix of both avoids polarization and promotes consensus across a broad profile of simple and complex opinion diffusion processes.
Recommended citation: Henrique M. Borges, Vítor V. Vasconcelos, and Flávio L. Pinheiro. "How social rewiring preferences bridge polarized communities "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 180 (2024): 114594.
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