Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies

Over the past two decades, the number of close social connections increased substantially, at least by a factor of two. At the same time, societal opinions have become increasingly polarized in many Western countries. To explore whether these trends could be connected, we employ a simple computational model of society, where people-within their social networks-continuously compare and update their opinions. Here, we show that the model that is known to realistically capture both homophily and social balance exhibits a phase transition phenomenon where, above a critical social connectivity, an explosive transition toward strong polarization must occur. The model allows us to understand the empirical inflation of polarization during the last decades as a function of the observed increased values of social connectivity. In the presence of a small fraction of synchronized influencers, the transition becomes continuous; however, polarization then appears at lower connectivities. We discuss the implications of the presence of a phase transition in social polarization.