New discussions challenge the organization of societies

Can the discussions about new issues challenge the organization of a society? That is, the question we tried to answer with a very simple model considering a society where individuals are organized into groups. An individual discuss its opinion on this new issue following the rule of the bounded confidence model implying that an individual influences and is influenced when it is sufficiently open-minded. One of the main ingredients of the model is the groups that both influence the behavior of the individual and characterize the social network topology. Individuals choose the group membership according to their opinion. Starting from an initial homogeneous group size distribution, four different prototypical regimes can be reproduced by the model, depending on the individual open-mindedness: From a high heterogeneity condition, with one or two largely major groups, to an invariant situation of homogeneity. The heterogeneity is explained by the dynamics of individuals. In this paper, we extend the studies of a previous work on the argument, deepening the analysis on the internal structure of the groups and on the dynamical process itself. To do this, we analyze indicators related to the stability of the obtained virtual society. We found that the dynamics of groups is not stable when open-mindedness is small, even if the dynamics of opinions reaches equilibrium. On the other side, for larger values of the open-mindedness, both the opinion and the group dynamics stabilize. Thus, our study shows that the introduction of a new topic of discussion in a society can strongly challenge group structures, both concerning their stability and their size.