WITHDRAWN

Social polarization increasingly undermines the collaborative dialogue essential to democratic societies, necessitating a clearer understanding of the mechanisms behind its emergence and resolution. Traditional research has explained polarization through interpersonal repulsion, in which individuals move their opinions away from different views (e.g., Axelrod et al., 2021). While this framework focuses on conflicts among active speakers, it overlooks the silence and withdrawal of moderates. We developed a model that excludes repulsion and incorporates the silence gap effect, in which individuals remain silent toward those with stronger attitudes. Simulations show that in the early stages, the silence gap effect causes moderates to remain silent while allowing extreme opinions to dominate public expressions. This generates perceived polarization, a state in which the distribution of public opinion becomes bimodal despite unimodal internal attitudes. Subsequently, the frequently expressed extreme opinions pull other agents toward the poles, eventually leading to polarization. These findings demonstrate that the essence of polarization lies in the silence of moderates. Furthermore, our study shows that polarization can be prevented by neutralizing the silence gap effect, ensuring that moderates do not suppress opinions. However, we found that even slight differences in intervention timing determined whether future polarization was successfully averted. By contrast, interventions aimed at correcting the misperception of a polarized public failed to prevent division. Therefore, to resolve polarization, it is vital to create a dialogue environment in which moderates can speak as early as possible without apprehension, rather than directly addressing extreme voices or promoting the correction of public perception.