Communication and trust in the bounded confidence model

The communication process in a situation of emergency is discussed within the Scheff theory of shame and pride. The communication involves messages from media and from other persons. Three strategies are considered: selfish (to contact friends), collective (to join other people) and passive (to do nothing). We show that the pure selfish strategy cannot be evolutionarily stable. The main result is that the community structure is statistically meaningful only if the interpersonal communication is weak.

💡 Research Summary

The paper investigates how information exchange and trust evolve during emergency situations by combining Scheff’s sociological theory of shame and pride with a bounded‑confidence opinion dynamics model. The authors treat the flow of messages from mass media and from interpersonal contacts as two distinct channels that compete for influence over individuals’ beliefs and subsequent actions.

Three behavioral strategies are defined. The “selfish” strategy limits communication to a small circle of trusted friends; the “collective” strategy encourages individuals to seek as many contacts as possible and to form a large, cooperative network; the “passive” strategy eschews any direct interaction, relying exclusively on media broadcasts. Each strategy is encoded in the model by adjusting two key parameters: α, the weight of peer‑to‑peer influence, and β, the weight of the media signal. The opinion of agent i at time t, xi(t)∈