Information and Attitude Diffusion in Networks Wai-Tat Fu and Q. Vera Liao University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL 61822, USA wfu@illinois.edu Abstract. The availability of diverse information does not guarantee that a person’s views will be equally diverse. Research has consistently shown that attitudinal positions on an issue will lead to selective reception and dissemination of information, which in turn have reciprocal effects on those attitudes. The current paper aims at understanding how the diffusion of in- formation and attitudes in networks are dynamically related to each other from a computational perspective. Simulations from an agent-based model show that selective exposure of information and social reinforcement in ac- tive dissemination of information can lead to polarization of attitudes in the network. Network structures are shown to have significant effects on information and attitude diffusion. While simple contagion models of in- formation diffusion predicts that hub nodes in a small-world network can facilitate propagation of information, our model shows that hub nodes can induce stronger polarization of attitudes when information and attitude diffusion can mutually influence each other. Results highlight the impor- tance of incorporating social science research in network models to better establish the micro-to-macro links. Keywords: Attitude diffusion, selective exposure of information, active dissemination of information, information cascades. 1 Introduction Research on information diffusion shows that a small number of bridge links in a network can lead to wide spread propagation of information [4, 12]. However, to predict the spread of more complex social behavior, such as political, religious, or cultural movements, it is important to understand how information may impact attitudes of individuals, such that one can predict how their behavior will be changed by the information. There is, however, still a lack of research on how information diffusion is related to attitude diffusion, and how their relations are impacted by different network structures. Indeed, observations of most groups seem to suggest that there is almost always some diversity of opinion even after extensive exchanges of information, and our world remains incredibly divided even on basic factual issues[9]. 2 Background Research on information diffusion show that propagation of information can be surprisingly efficient in networks that have few bridging or weak links [4]). S.J. Yang, A.M. Greenberg, and M. Endsley (Eds.): SBP 2012, LNCS 7227, pp. 205–213, 2012. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012