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. 2020 Feb 4;17(3):946.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph17030946.

Public Opinion Polarization by Individual Revenue from the Social Preference Theory

Tinggui Chen  1   2 , Qianqian Li  2 , Peihua Fu  2 , Jianjun Yang  3 , Chonghuan Xu  4 , Guodong Cong  5 , Gongfa Li  6
Affiliations

Public Opinion Polarization by Individual Revenue from the Social Preference Theory

Tinggui Chen et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Social conflicts occur frequently duringthe social transition period and the polarization of public opinion happens occasionally. By introducing the social preference theory, the target of this paper is to reveal the micro-interaction mechanism of public opinion polarization. Firstly, we divide the social preferences of Internet users (network nodes) into three categories: egoistic, altruistic, and fair preferences, and adopt the revenue function to define the benefits obtained by individuals with different preferences among their interaction process so as to analyze their decision-making behaviors driven by the revenue. Secondly, the revenue function is used to judge the exit rules of nodes in a network, and then a dynamic network of spreading public opinionwith the node (individual) exit mechanism is built based on a BA scale-free network. Subsequently, the influences of different social preferences,as well as individual revenue on the effect of public opinionpolarization, are analyzed through simulation experiments. The simulation results show that(1) Different social preferences demonstrate different influences on the evolution of public opinions, (2) Individuals tend to interact with ones with different preferences, (3) The network with a single preference or a high aggregation is more likely to form public opinion polarization. Finally, the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed model are verified by a real case.

Keywords: individual interaction; individual revenue; public opinion polarization; social preference.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Research framework in this paper.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Diagram of social mainstream revenue with negative attitude.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Calculation diagram of social mainstream revenue with positive attitude.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Diagram of intimacy hij.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Diagram of intimacy hij.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Comparison of interaction revenue.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Revenue change diagram.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Intimacy modification diagram.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Simulation process of opinion evolution.
Figure 9
Figure 9
The mottled diagram of the intimacy degree of all nodes.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Attitude values of individuals at different times.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Distributions of intimacy degree.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Distributions of intimacy degree.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Percentage of polarized individuals over time.
Figure 13
Figure 13
The relationships between percentage of polarized individuals and the proportion of individuals with different preferences.
Figure 14
Figure 14
The influences of different preference proportions on the polarization after 100 experiments.
Figure 15
Figure 15
Opinion distributions of “Sleep”, “Cool” events.
Figure 16
Figure 16
Distribution of attitude values at the initial time and time = 10.
Figure 17
Figure 17
Connections among network nodes at the initial time and time = 10.
Figure 18
Figure 18
Node connections when N = 20.
Figure 19
Figure 19
Connections of three different preferences and distribution.
Figure 19
Figure 19
Connections of three different preferences and distribution.
Figure 20
Figure 20
The influences of different preferences on individual revenue.
Figure 21
Figure 21
The influences of individual revenue on public opinion polarization.
Figure 22
Figure 22
Individual attitude distributions at different times.
Figure 23
Figure 23
Polarization proportion with changes over time.
Figure 24
Figure 24
Individual proportions with three different preferences changing over time.
Figure 25
Figure 25
Opinion distributions of the event “web celebrity beating a pregnant woman”.
Figure 26
Figure 26
The results of a real case simulation of two models. (a) Model which considers individual heterogeneity preference in this paper. (b) Macro polarization model in [14].
Figure 27
Figure 27
Specific preference analysis of a real case.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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