We present a brief history of models of opinion dynamics in groups of agents, and summarise work from the creation of the Bounded Confidence model (Krause 2000; Hegselmann and Krause 2002) through to the more recent development of the Relative Agreement (RA) model (Deffuant et al. 2002; Deffuant 2006)....

This article has two goals. Firstly, it shows how a relatively novel technique (Agent Based Modelling, hereafter ABM) can integrate different data types that are often used only in separate strands of research (interviews, experiments and surveys). It does this by comparing a well-known ABM of...