The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been in the focus of interest for decades, both from theoretical and modelling points of view. Regarding modelling attempts, an entire scientific field -- opinion dynamics -- has emerged in order to study this and related phenomena. Within this framework, agents' opinions are usually represented by a scalar value which undergoes modification due to interaction with other agents. Under certain conditions, these models are able to reproduce polarization -- a state increasingly familiar to our everyday experience. In the present paper an alternative explanation is being suggested along with its corresponding model. More specifically, we demonstrate that by incorporating two well-known human characteristics into the representation of agents, namely: (1) in the human brain beliefs are interconnected, and (2) people strive to maintain a coherent belief system; polarization immediately starts up under exposure to news and information. Furthermore, the model gives account for the proliferation of fake news, and shows how opinion polarization is related to various cognitive biases.
Opinion polarization in human communities can emerge as a natural consequence of beliefs being interrelated