Finding Common Ground: A Two-Opinion Approach to Reducing Polarization in Networks

The most obvious strategy for reducing polarization in social networks is to connect people with opposing views. However, this is neither realistic nor likely to result in productive connections or conversations. To reduce polarization in networks, we propose a two-dimensional model with two opinion sets, each representing a different issue. We introduce a new common ground strategy to more realistically reduce polarization on a primary issue, by creating connections between individuals with similarities on a separate, secondary issue. We measure our common ground strategy’s impact on polarization on both synthetic and real-world networks. We find a significant reduction in polarization th rough utilization of this common ground strategy. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sukishore12/minimizing-polarization.