Propagation effects of filtering incongruent information
Effet sur la diffusion du filtrage des informations incongruentes
Résumé
We propose a simple individual-based model of information filtering and study some of its implications on the attitude about an object. The model assumes that a filter selects only important features, with a higher threshold of importance when the attitude about the feature is incongruent with the global attitude about the object. Moreover, we suppose that individuals transmit only features which are congruent with their global attitude. We consider two variants of this model. For both of them, different orders of feature reception can lead to different attitudes. For instance, an individual with a positive attitude about the object, can finally become negative, even though the object is globally neutral (the sum of the feature attitudes is 0). The interactions among individuals can significantly increase the probability of such non-rational attitudes.