The formation of opinions in a social context has long been studied by sociologists. A well-known model is due to Friedkin and Johnsen (further referenced as the FJ model), which assumes that individuals hold an immutable internal opinion while they express an opinion that may differ from it but is more in agreement with the expressed opinions of their friends. Formally, the expressed opinion is modeled as the weighted average of the individual's internal opinion and the expressed opinions of their neighbors. This model has been used in recent research originating from the computer science community, studying the origination and reduction of conflict on social networks, how echo chambers arise and can be burst, and more.
Yet, we argue that the FJ model in its elementary form is not suitable for some of these purposes. Indeed, the FJ model entails that the more friends one has, the less one's internal opinion matters in the formation of one's expressed opinion. Arguing that this may not be realistic, we propose a modification of the FJ model that normalizes the influence of one's friends and keeps the influence of one's internal opinion constant. This normalization was in fact suggested by Friedkin and Johnsen, but it has been ignored in much of the recent computer science literature.
In this work-in-progress report, we present the details of the normalized model, and investigate the consequences of this normalization, both theoretically and empirically
