Dans le cadre du colloquium Jacques Morgenstern, Andreas Flache, professeur de sociologie à l'université de Groningue, proposera une conférence intitulée "Opinion polarization and network segregation. Modelling a complex Relationship" le 24 juin à 11h en visio-conférence. La présentation sera faite en anglais. Présentation et inscription
Recently, many societies seem to shift towards more polarization and volatility in opinions, for example in attitudes about immigration, climate policy, or the best policy response to Covid-19. A key obstacle for a scientific understanding of this development is that opinion dynamics in society involve a complex micro-macro interaction between processes of social influence occurring at the micro-level, meso-level conditions like network structures, and macro-level outcomes, like consensus, opinion-clustering or polarization. I will discuss how agent-based simulation models (ABM) can be used to further our understanding how micro-level processes relate to macro-level dynamics in opinion formation. Computational agent-based models will be presented that highlight alternative and competing theoretical perspectives, some suggesting that network segregation between different groups fosters polarizations, other pointing to the opposite possibility. I will also discuss how empirical research using experiments and social network data can help to test model implications..