  Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or
strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status
quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity
ultimately leads to social polarization, which is not a desirable phenomenon.
We address this question within an agent-based model of discrete choices. Using
the way of modeling social responses in continuous opinion models, we propose a
three-state $q$-voter model with anticonformity and bounded confidence. We
analyze the model on a complete graph using the mean-field approach and Monte
Carlo simulations. We show that strong polarization appears only for a small
probability of anticonformity, which means that conformity combined with
homophily enhances polarization. Our findings agree with results obtained
previously in the group discussion experiment and within various continuous
opinion models.
