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As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members basetheir views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is notnecessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to informationflow through various channels of media, i.e. newspapers, television, radio,internet, and web. It is thought that this is mainly due to the conflictinginformation on the mass media and to the individual attitude (formed bycultural, educational and environmental factors), that is, one external factorand another personal factor. In this paper we will investigate the dynamicaldevelopment of opinion in a small population of agents by means of acomputational model of opinion formation in a co-evolving network of sociallylinked agents. The personal and external factors are taken into account byassigning an individual attitude parameter to each agent, and by subjecting allto an external but homogeneous field to simulate the effect of the media. Wethen adjust the field strength in the model by using actual data on scientificperception surveys carried out in two different populations, which allow us tocompare two different societies. We interpret the model findings with the aidof simple mean field calculations. Our results suggest that scientificallysound concepts are more difficult to acquire than concepts not validated byscience, since opposing individuals organize themselves in close communitiesthat prevent opinion consensus.

Are Opinions Based on Science: Modelling Social Response to Scientific Facts