People do not always express what they privately believe. Sometimes they conform outwardly while disagreeing internally; sometimes they do the opposite and publicly resist an opinion that they may privately accept; and sometimes an expressed opinion later reshapes private belief. Because of such tensions between inner beliefs and visible behavior, societies may remain locked into outdated collective states even after external conditions have changed.

In this talk, Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron will discuss a class of agent-based models designed to capture the interplay between private and expressed opinions. The starting point is an extension of the nonlinear q-voter model in which each agent carries two binary states: a private opinion, invisible to others, and an expressed opinion, visible in social interaction. This simple distinction allows us to connect concepts from statistical physics and social psychology, including conformity, independence, disinhibitory contagion, anticonformity, preference falsification, pluralistic ignorance, cognitive dissonance, and social hysteresis.

The main focus of the talk will be the role of self-anticonformity, which in these models occurs when an agent’s private opinion changes under social influence in such a way that it becomes inconsistent with the agent’s own expressed opinion. In other words, the agent privately aligns with the group while publicly remaining opposed, not only to the group, but also to its own newly adopted private belief. Although this mechanism may look counterintuitive, it turns out to have important consequences for collective dynamics.

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