SMU Associate Professor of Psychology Angela Leung has won the Best Paper Award conferred by the 7th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC 2020). The paper entitled "Dual attitude model of opinion diffusion: Experiments with epistemically motivated agents" was a collaboration between Dr Phang Riyang, Dr Lin Qiu and Associate Professor Angela Leung. The paper is an interdisciplinary work leveraging on the perspective of computational social sciences to examine how agent-based modelling can be grounded in social psychological theories to study opinion diffusion among interactive agents.
Paper Abstract:
This research simulated opinion diffusion in agent-based models to reveal the perpetuation of norms and beliefs. We present a dual attitude model wherein agents’ interaction, information search, and opinion formation are influenced by their open-mindedness (i.e., the need for cognitive closure; NFCC). Two experiments simulated topic advocacy with either high- or low-NFCC agents. Experiment 1 initiated societies with unbiased distribution of NFCC levels between advocates of two competing topics, whereas Experiment 2 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, but decreases over time in low-NFCC societies. These results are magnified in the biased context where high-NFCC agents provided an NFCC advantage for their advocated topic. Unlike traditional approaches, the application of the agent-based simulation methodology in behavioral sciences can reveal real-time dynamics among interactive agents. The current findings shed novel light on the roles of open-mindedness and edge-of-cluster agents in enabling opinion resistance, diffusion, and receptivity, bringing important insights onto within- and between-society cultural shifts.