  Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents
with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in
radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday
life. Here we show that widening disagreement among groups may be linked to the
advancement of information communication technology, by analyzing a
mathematical model of population dynamics in a continuous opinion space. We
adopted the interaction kernel approach to model enhancement of people's
information gathering ability and introduced a generalized non-local gradient
as individuals' perception kernel. We found that the characteristic distance
between population peaks becomes greater as the wider range of opinions becomes
available to individuals or the greater attention is attracted to opinions
distant from theirs. These findings may provide a possible explanation for why
disagreement is growing in today's increasingly interconnected society, without
attributing its cause only to specific individuals or events.
