Sensitivity of primacy effect to interactions
Impact de l'interaction sur l'effet de primauté
Résumé
We propose an individual based model of attitude dynamics which, in some conditions, reproduces primacy effect behaviours. The primacy effect takes place when the attitude of an individual depends on the reception order of features describing an object. Typically, when receiving a strong negative feature first, the individual keeps a negative attitude whatever the number of moderate positive features it receives afterwards. We consider a population of individuals which receive the features from a media, and communicate with each other: in some cases, interactions increase the number of individuals exhibiting a primacy effect, in other cases they decrease this number. We study the sensitivity of this phenomenon to the interaction structure and to the part of the population with an initial negative attitude.