  An existing model of opinion dynamics on an adaptive social network is
extended to introduce update policy heterogeneity, representing the fact that
individual differences between social animals can affect their tendency to
form, and be influenced by, their social bonds with other animals. As in the
original model, the opinions and social connections of a population of model
agents change due to three social processes: conformity, homophily and
neophily. Here, however, we explore the case in which each node's
susceptibility to these three processes is parameterised by node-specific
values drawn independently at random from some distribution. This introduction
of heterogeneity increases both the degree of extremism and connectedness in
the final population (relative to comparable homogeneous networks) and leads to
significant assortativity with respect to node update policy parameters as well
as node opinions. Each node's update policy parameters also predict properties
of the community that they will belong to in the final network configuration.
These results suggest that update policy heterogeneity in social populations
may have a significant impact on the formation of extremist communities in
real-world populations.
