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taylorvich [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://physicsworld.com/a/the-laws-of-division-physicists-probe-into-the-polarization-of-political-opinions/ [physicsworld.com]

Across the world, varying factions of society seem to be angrier and more divided than ever. But as Anna Demming explains, physicists are doing their best to shed light on what has gone wrong

Aeroplane contrails are being deliberately loaded with an extraterrestrial, disease-causing, silicon-based life form: such was the claim back in 2006 by Bill Deagle, a Canadian medical doctor and self-proclaimed “prophet”. “This is a silicon-based life form that is intelligent like bees or ants and it fights back,” he warned. Despite no evidence for silicon-based life, Deagle’s claim has continually resurfaced on social media. In March this year, one Facebook post about it received more than 37,000 likes and 33,000 shares amid a flood of endorsing comments.

Before social media came along, we might have thought that making it easier for people to debate would bring us all together and promote consensus. In reality, the opposite seems nearer the mark: people appear to be angrier, and their opinions more polarized than ever. Social media is widely believed to have helped foment the 2011 UK riots, for instance, and more recently the storming of the US Capitol following the 2020 US presidential election. Naturally, there is a keen interest in understanding what is driving these divisions and what – if anything – can be done about them. As it turns out, physics may have some answers.

The idea of applying physics to describe social phenomena extends back at least as far as the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who attempted to describe the “physical phenomena” of society in terms of Galileo’s laws of motion. In recent decades, the development of physical models has grown into a formal field of research known as “sociophysics” (J. Mathematical Sociology 9 1) – encouraged by what appears to be the successful prediction of election results, the demonstration of how polarized views can take hold, and even proposals for how to de-polarize them.

For over a decade, political and social scientists have ascribed an increase in division to the effects of social-media bubbles and echo chambers, and the idea that the absence of interactions with people who oppose our views can make our views more extreme. However, when physicists have modelled social behaviour by, for instance, making opposing views repulsive, they fail to replicate this polarizing effect. Indeed, the models even suggest the outcome would be a greater consensus.

In 2020 physicist Michele Starnini at Polytechnic University of Catalunya, Spain and CENTAI, Italy, and colleagues attempted to settle what is driving polarization, by modelling the strength of the opinions held by people as a function of the strength of the opinions they are directly exposed to (Phys. Rev. Lett. 124 048301). Earlier models were usually based on “constructive opinion dynamics”, where unrestricted modes of interaction would eventually lead to a consensus, even on controversial issues. Their new model, however, introduces the dynamics of radicalization as a reinforcing mechanism, so that connections became more likely between people with like views. Starnini’s work shows how extreme opinions can evolve from moderate initial conditions.

The researchers’ model led to three possible states: a consensus, polarized views or radicalized views – the last involving people holding extreme views at one end of the spectrum but not the other (Phys. Rev. X 11 011012). Their analytical solutions reflected what we see empirically – when people’s views are strongly influenced by others, and the issue at stake is controversial, those opinions become more extreme. Add in a strong tendency for people to form connections with others who are like-minded, and the overall network becomes not radicalized, but polarized (figure 1). Indeed, Starnini’s team found that the modelled polarized distribution of opinions agreed with an analysis of real social-media data from users engaged in debates on abortion, Obamacare and gun control on X (formerly known as Twitter), as well as additional user opinion data taken from other social-media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Original Submission