Attitude Dynamics With Limited Verbalisation Capabilities

This article offers a new perspective for research on opinion dynamics. It demonstrates the importance of the distinction of opinion and attitude, which originally has been discussed in literature on consumer behaviour. As opinions are verbalised attitudes not only biases in interpretation and adoption processes have to be considered but also verbalisation biases should be addressed. Such biases can be caused by language deficits or social norms. The model presented in this article captures the basic features of common opinion dynamic models and additionally biases in the verbalisation process. Further, it gives a first analysis of this model and shows that precision as bias in the verbalisation process can influence the dynamics significantly. Presenting and applying the concept of area of influential attitudes the impact of each parameter (selective attitude, selective interpretation, and precision) is analysed independently. Some preliminary results for combined effects are presented.