A bounded-confidence opinion-dynamics model. Each dot is a person with an opinion (position) and social status (size, weight of influence). Watch how openness to other views, status inequality and random shocks push a society toward consensus, polarization, or lasting fragmentation.
Each agent i holds an opinion x₀ in [0,1]. On every update, i averages the opinions of every agent within a confidence radius ε (the "openness" slider), weighted by each neighbor's status. Small ε fragments society into many stable clusters; large ε drives everyone toward a single consensus.
Vertical position and dot size encode social status, which weights how much influence an agent has over its neighbors' opinions. Status drifts slowly toward the group's dominant opinion (conformity reward) but is pulled back toward a random baseline by the mobility slider — high mobility flattens the hierarchy over time.
At the configured shock rate, a random agent's opinion jumps discontinuously — a stand-in for a war, a scandal, a new technology, a social movement. Shocks can reopen a settled, polarized society and restart the drift toward a new equilibrium, which is exactly how real social change propagates through a bounded-confidence system.