Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dual Attitude Model Of Opinion Diffusion: Experiments With Epistemically Motivated Agents, Riyang Phang, Lin Qiu, Angela K. Y. Leung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Opinion diffusion is often simulated in agentbased models to reveal the perpetuation of norms and beliefs. This paper presents a dual attitude model where agents’ interaction, information search, and opinion formation are influenced by the need for cognitive closure (NFCC). Two experiments simulated topic advocacy with either high- or lowNFCC agents. Experiment one initiated societies with unbiased distribution of NFCC levels between advocates of two competing topics, while experiment two initiated biased distributions of NFCC levels between the topics. Results in the unbiased condition showed that the popularity of the majority topic increases over time in high NFCC societies while …