Elpida Tzafestas
The model has agents belonging to occupational or cultural groups who form opinions about how people are doing, both inside their own group and outside it. Those opinions come from two sources: observing your own group directly, or hearing about other groups through word of mouth from people who belong to them.
Adding mass media introduces a third channel with a different character. It reaches everyone at once and reports on all groups indirectly, so it can either correct the distortions of word of mouth or amplify them, depending on what it says and who believes it.
What makes this worth modelling is that the mechanisms interact. Word of mouth is accurate about your own group and increasingly unreliable about distant ones, which is exactly where media coverage carries most weight, since it is filling a gap personal experience cannot.
We study a society of agents belonging to a number of occupational or cultural groups that form opinions about others' situation in the same or different group. Opinions develop either by observation within own group or by directly interacting with members of other groups, therefore by word of mouth (WoM). Additionally, global mass media (MM) may be available that inform indirectly about the situation of the various groups. The sociocultural interplay of these processes and…
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