Exchanging arguments with others plays a crucial role when forming opinions on many issues, e.g. the trustworthiness of a political candidate or the usefulness of an electronic device. Providing persuasive arguments and assessing new ones influences our decisions, very often, more crucially than isolated inquiry. However, this process has a number of shortcomings, many of which have been identified and studied by social scientists. One most relevant is group-induced attitude polarization. Group polarization is a collective phenomenon that typically occurs when an initial tendency of individual group members toward a given direction is enhanced following group discussion. For example, a group of members of the same party will get more convinced of their opinion after an internal debate. Detrimental echo chambers and radical divergence between different communities are easily generated by this dynamic. Although it is widely recognized, by experimental and simulative studies, that the exchange of persuasive pro and contra arguments influences polarization, the exact mechanisms by which this process unfolds are still unclear. In particular, it is crucial to assess the impact played by the strategic disclosure of arguments and their more or less biased assimilation by individuals. The main aim of the EDAPOL project is to develop a formal understanding of these factors, so to unveil the step-by-step structure of the process of information flow and opinion change that generates polarization in a group. To this end, the project combines formal methods from argumentation theory and dynamic epistemic logic. Understanding polarization on a rigorous basis meets an important societal challenge in the era of social media. Indeed, virtual online discussion witnesses a more pronounced tendency for groups to polarize towards opposite directions than face-to-face discussions, with a detrimental impact on the associated life of our society.
The first preliminary objective of the EDAPOL project is to model the argumentative knowledge base of individuals and the effect on their opinion of different policies of argument disclosure (more or less transparent) and of belief update (more or less credulous). The second objective is to assess how different combinations of such policies, if held by individuals in a small group of debate, determine polarization of opinions. The subsequent and final step of this research in EDAPOL is to set the ground for implementation of this framework in multi-agent simulations and experimental work in social sciences, by harmonizing it with existent models in the area.
