https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-02111-y
Regular Article
Diversity mitigates polarisation and consensus in opinion dynamics
Department of Physics, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, 221005, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Received:
28
September
2025
Accepted:
16
December
2025
Published online:
7
January
2026
We study the opinion dynamics in a population by considering a variant of the Kuramoto model where the phase of an oscillator represents the opinion of an individual on a single topic. Two extreme phases separated by 
represent opposing views. Any other phase is considered as an intermediate opinion between the two extremes. The interaction (or attitude) between two individuals depends on the difference between their opinions and can be positive (attractive) or negative (repulsive) based on the defined thresholds. We investigate the opinion dynamics when these thresholds are varied. We observe an explosive transition from a bipolarised state to a consensus state with the existence of scattered and tripolarised states at low values of threshold parameter. The system exhibits multistability between various states in a sizable parameter region. These transitions and multistability are studied in populations with different degrees of diversity represented by the width of conviction distribution. We found that a more homogeneous population has greater tendency to exhibit bipolarised, tripolarised, and clustered states, whereas a diverse population helps mitigate polarisation amongst individuals by reaching a consensus sooner. Ott–Antonsen analysis is used to analyse the system’s long-term macroscopic behaviour and verify the numerical results. We also study the effect of neutral individuals that do not interact with others or do not change their attitude on opinion formation, nature of transitions, and multistability. Furthermore, we apply our model to language data to study the assimilation of diverse languages in India and compare the results with those obtained from model equations.
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Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
