CoDiNG -- Naming Game with Continuous Latent Opinions of Individual Agents

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms behind opinion formation is crucial for gaining insight into the processes that shape the spread of political beliefs, cultural attitudes, consumer choices, and social movements in society. This work introduces a realistic model of opinion dynamics that captures the intricacies of real-world opinion dynamics by synthesizing principles from cognitive science. The proposed model is a hybrid continuous-discrete extension of the well-known Naming Game opinion model. The continuous layer captures the strength of each opinion through reinforcement and forgetting in the human brain, akin to memory imprints. The discrete layer allows for converting intrinsic continuous opinion into a discrete form, which often occurs when we publicly verbalize our opinions. We evaluated our model on longitudinal data combining real communication events with repeated surveys of the same individuals, comparing it against the Naming Game, the hybrid SJBO model, and four simple baselines at the population and the individual level. Unlike rigid baselines and the classic Naming Game, which inherently capture only a single aspect, hybrid models can be tuned to model either individual-level opinions or aggregate opinion dynamics. However, this flexibility comes with a strict trade-off, as they cannot accurately reproduce both simultaneously. Out of the six analysed topics, our model exceeds or matches SJBO, showing that reinforcement and forgetting grounded in cognition contribute to explaining opinion dynamics. Additionally, in our empirical data, individuals change their opinions while the aggregate distribution stays almost stationary, so a model reproducing no dynamics can still score well. This observation indicates that evaluating opinion models must be multidimensional and rely on more than one metric.