I am thrilled to announce that my recent paper has been published in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). The paper presents an opinion dynamics model derived from a real-life experiment, which has enormous potential for understanding and addressing social problems requiring coordinated opinions, such as anthropogenic climate change.
In the study, participants were asked to report their opinions on a topic before and after a social interaction with another participant. We observed a statistically significant influence between participants, and also noticed three essential effects, which were used to build the opinion dynamics model.
The model was successful in generating realistic results, including polarization from unpolarized states and strong diversity. Our findings show that asking people their opinion is sufficient to influence opinion dynamics, even on novel topics, and that people with extreme opinions exhibit less change than those with neutral opinions.
You can find the full paper here: https://www.jasss.org/25/4/4.html