Aperiodic dynamics in a deterministic model of attitude formation in social groups

Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals’ attitudinal states to their frequency of interaction, and hence structural tie strength, while social influence causes the convergence of individuals’ states during interaction. Building on these basic elements, we propose a new mathematical modelling framework to describe the evolution of attitudes within a group of interacting agents. Specifically, our model describes sub-conscious attitudes that have an activator-inhibitor relationship. We consider a homogeneous population using a deterministic, continuous-time dynamical system. Surprisingly, the combined effects of homophily and social influence do not necessarily lead to group consensus or global monoculture. We observe that sub-group formation and polarisation-like effects may be transient, the long-time dynamics being quasi-periodic with sensitive dependence to initial conditions. This is due to the interplay between the evolving interaction network and Turing instability associated with the attitudinal state dynamics.