Can Extremism Guarantee Pluralism?
) Abstract Many models have been proposed to explain the opinion formation in a group of individuals; most of these models study the opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a very complex process and a realistic model should also take into account the important feedbacks that the opinions of the agents have on the structure of the social networks and on the characteristics of the opinion dynamics. In this paper we will show that associating to different agents different kind of interconnections and different interacting behaviour can lead to interesting scenarios, like the co-existence of several opinion clusters, namely pluralism. In our model agents have opinions uniformly and continuously distributed between two extremes. The social network is formed through a social aggregation mechanism including the segregation process of the extremists that results in many real communities. We show how this process affects opinion dyn
