The Role of Mistrust in the Modelling of Opinion Adoption

Societies tend to partition into factions based on shared beliefs, leading to sectarian conflict in society. This paper investigates mistrust as a cause for this partitioning by extending an established opinion dynamics model with Bayesian updating that specifies mistrust as the underlying mechanism for disagreement and, ultimately, polarisation. We demonstrate that mistrust is at the foundation of polarisation. Detailed analysis and the results of rigorous simulation studies provide new insight into the potential role of mistrust in polarisation. We show that consensus results when mistrust levels are low, but introducing extreme agents makes consensus significantly harder to reach and highly fragmented and dispersed. These results also suggest a method to verify the model using real-world experimental or observational data empirically.