We study how different forms of social capital lead to different distributions of multidimensional opinions by affecting the channels through which individuals communicate. We develop a model to compare and contrast the evolution of opinions between societies whose members communicate through bonding associations (i.e., which bond similar people together) and societies where communication is through bridging associations (i.e., which bridge the gap among different people). Both processes converge towards opinion distributions where there are groups within which there is consensus in all issues. Bridging processes are more likely to lead to society-wide consensus and converge to distributions that have, on average, fewer opinion groups. The latter result holds even when the confidence bound that allows successful communication in the bridging process is much smaller than the respective bound in the bonding process.

我们研究了不同形式的社会资本如何通过影响个人交流的渠道而导致多维意见的不同分布。我们开发了一个模型，以比较和对比成员之间通过联系协会进行沟通的社会（即，将相似的人联系在一起）和通过桥梁联系进行沟通的社会（即，弥合不同人之间的鸿沟）之间的观点演变。这两个过程都趋向于意见分配，在这些意见分配中，在所有问题上都存在共识的群体。桥接过程更有可能导致全社会范围内的共识，并趋向于平均而言较少意见组的分配。