Intergroup Conflict Escalation Leads to More Extremism

Empirical findings in the intergroup conflict literature show that individuals’ beliefs that mark differentiation from out-groups become radicalized as intergroup tensions escalate. They also show that this differentiation is proportional to tension escalation. In this paper, we are interested to develop an agent-based model which captures these findings in order to explore the effect of perceived intergroup conflict escalation on the average number of emergent extremists and opinion clusters in the population. The proposed model builds on the 2-dimensional bounded confidence model proposed by Huet et al (2008). The results show that the average number of extremists has a negative correlation with intolerance threshold and positive correlation with the amount of opinion movement when two agents are to reject each other’s belief. In other words, the more tensions exist between groups, the more individuals getting extremists. We also found that intergroup conflict escalation leads to lower opinion diversity in the population compared with normal situations.