Conciliatory and contradictory dynamics in opinion formation

In this article, we use a kinetic description to study the effect of different psychologies on the evolution of the opinion with respect to a binary choice, in a closed group. We show that the interaction between individuals with different reactions regarding the exchange of opinion induces certain phenomena, such as the concentration of opinions or the cyclic-in-time behaviour of the distribution function. We provide an existence and uniqueness result for the model, and numerically test it in some relevant cases. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.