ToRealSim Towards realistic computational models of social influence dynamics

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Klaus Boehnke; Professor Dr. Guillaume Deffuant; Professor Bruce Edmonds, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Andreas Flache
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Political Science ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396901899

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

Amidst the recent societal shifts towards increased polarization and volatility in opinions, such as those regarding immigration or climate policy, the underlying reasons remain poorly understood. The ToRealSim project, with its primary focus on the complex micro-macro interaction in opinion dynamics, has emerged as a key player in this field. It addresses the intricate interplay between fundamental interpersonal processes of social influence, mesolevel conditions like network structures, and macro-level outcomes, such as polarization in opinion distributions. The ToRealSim project was a collaborative endeavor, part of a larger consortium of four partners, each contributing a unique perspective on opinion dynamics. Our role was to analyze large-scale international survey data, a crucial step in informing the model development and validating the models with empirical data. This collaborative approach has enriched the project's outcomes and underscores the importance of collective efforts in advancing our understanding of opinion dynamics. The ToRealSim project has yielded significant insights, revealing opinion dynamics as a complex interplay of individual attitude change and societal dynamics. These findings have been disseminated through various channels, including the publication of three scientific papers, with two more in the pipeline. We have also shared our results at conferences, and notably, the project organized a scientific conference on opinion dynamics and collective decisions. The implications of these results are far-reaching, contributing to our understanding of opinion formation dynamics in society and paving the way for strategies to counteract polarization and radicalization. Moreover, they provide a new ground for the calibration of agent-based models to empirical data.

Publications

• Individual attitude change and societal dynamics: Computational experiments with psychological theories.. Psychological Review, 128(4), 623-642.
  Lorenz, Jan; Neumann, Martin & Schröder, Tobias
  
• Decomposing attitude distributions to characterize attitude polarization in Europe. SN Social Sciences, 2(7).
  Gestefeld, Martin; Lorenz, Jan; Henschel, Nils Tobias & Boehnke, Klaus
  
• Calibrating an Opinion Dynamics Model to Empirical Opinion Distributions and Transitions. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 26(4).
  Gestefeld, Martin & Lorenz, Jan