Computational Agent-based Models in Opinion Dynamics: A Survey on Social Simulations and Empirical Studies

Understanding how an individual changes its attitude, belief, and opinion due to other people's social influences is vital because of its wide implications. A core methodology that is used to study the change of attitude under social influences is agent-based model (ABM). The goal of this review paper is to compare and contrast existing ABMs, which I classify into two families, the deductive ABMs and the inductive ABMs. The former subsumes social simulation studies, and the latter involves human experiments. To facilitate the comparison between ABMs of different formulations, I propose a general unified formulation, in which all ABMs can be viewed as special cases. In addition, I show the connections between deductive ABMs and inductive ABMs, and point out their strengths and limitations. At the end of the paper, I identify underexplored areas and suggest future research directions.