Academic Opinion Polarization Simulator

This simulator models how a community of academics debating a contested claim settles into consensus or fractures into rival camps, using the Deffuant bounded-confidence model of opinion dynamics. Each academic holds a continuous opinion between fully skeptical and fully convinced; two randomly paired academics only average their opinions toward each other when the gap between them is already smaller than a confidence threshold ε — beyond that threshold they simply do not influence each other at all. That single rule, repeated thousands of times, is enough to produce lasting, realistic opinion clusters instead of the single runaway consensus a simple contagion model would give. Adjust the confidence threshold, convergence rate and population size, and watch the scrolling distribution history reveal exactly when and how many camps form.