Social Capital, Communication Channels and Opinion Formation
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Social Capital, Communication Channels and Opinion Formation Christos Mavridis1 · Nikolas Tsakas2 Received: 22 May 2018 / Accepted: 7 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We study how different forms of social capital lead to different distributions of multidimensional opinions by affecting the channels through which individuals communicate. We develop a model to compare and contrast the evolution of opinions between societies whose members communicate through bonding associations (i.e., which bond similar people together) and societies where communication is through bridging associations (i.e., which bridge the gap among different people). Both processes converge towards opinion distributions where there are groups within which there is consensus in all issues. Bridging processes are more likely to lead to society-wide consensus and converge to distributions that have, on average, fewer opinion groups. The latter result holds even when the confidence bound that allows successful communication in the bridging process is much smaller than the respective bound in the bonding process.
The paper benefited significantly from the constructive comments of two anonymous referees, an associate editor and the editor, Maggie Penn. We are also grateful to Ignacio Ortuñ-Ortín for his advice and comments. We also wish to thank Juan Pablo Rincón-Zapatero, Georgios Piliouras, Guillermo Caruana, Jan Lorenz, Philippos Louis, Dimitrios Xefteris and Isabel Melguizo, as well as participants in the 4th Madrid Microeconomics Graduate Workshop for useful discussions. Part of this project was carried out while Nikolas Tsakas was at SUTD–MIT International Design Center at Singapore University of Technology and Design supported by Grant IDG31300110. * Christos Mavridis [email protected] Nikolas Tsakas [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Middlesex University London, The Burroughs, London NW4 4BT, UK
2
Department of Economics, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus
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1 Introduction People’s opinions are not fixed. Once an individual has formed an opinion about an issue, she may revisit it in the future, once she gets more information about it. Arguably, one of the most important avenues through which information is exchanged is by individually meeting and discussing with others. Of course, one might not necessarily take another’s opinion into account when updating her own, especially if this opinion is very different than hers. Oftentimes though, when two individuals who hold different opinions discuss, they see each others’ points; this way their opinions on the subject they discuss become more similar. The opportunities available to people to meet, interact and exchange opinions measure the stock of social capital of the community they live in. Depending on whether these opportunities result in individuals meeting other individuals similar to them, or individuals quite different to them, social capi
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