Building on the Lau and Murnighan’s theory of faultline strength, Flache and Mäs (2008) proposed a computational opinion dynamics model to explore the effect of demographic falutline strength on the cohesion of teams. We extend the Flache-Mäs model to incorporate the location and dyadic communication regime of the agents in the opinion formation process. More specifically, we make spatially proximate agents more likely to interact with each other in a pairwise communication regime. Our results show that when agents update their opinion after each pairwise encounter, the final opinion polarization is higher compared to when they update after interacting with all agents. However, if nearby agents are more likely to interact, we see less polarization in the final opinion space compared to the extended Flache-Mäs model. Policy implications of the results are discussed.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.comses.net/codebases/5758/releases/1.0.0/