The Dissemination of Culture

Abstract

Despite tendencies toward convergence, differences between individuals and groups continue to exist in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. An agent-based adaptive model reveals the effects of a mechanism of convergent social influence. The actors are placed at fixed sites. The basic premise is that the more similar an actor is to a neighbor, the more likely that that actor will adopt one of the neighbor's traits. Unlike previous models of social influence or cultural change that treat features one at a time, the proposed model takes into account the interaction between different features. The model illustrates how local convergence can generate global polarization. Simulations show that the number of stable homogeneous regions decreases with the number of features, increases with the number of alternative traits per feature, decreases with the range of interaction, and (most surprisingly) decreases when the geographic territory grows beyond a certain size.

Chimera states in population dynamics: Networks with fragmented and hierarchical connectivities

“…Similarly, a social analogue of a chimera state was reported in [49], where the authors investigated the emergence of localized coherence in two interacting populations of social agents. Two social models were implemented, the Axelrod model for culture dissemination [50] and the bounded confidence model by Deffuant et al [51]. Different synchronization patterns were obtained, including chimera states where one subpopulation of agents remained synchronized while the other was desynchronized.…”

Connections between the Sznajd model with general confidence rules and graph theory

“…One of these areas is sociophysics that studies how assumptions about the behavior and social interactions of people in a "microcospic level" creates emerging social behaviors, like opinion propagation, consensus formation, properties of elections, how wealth is distributed in society, among other topics. Typical approaches include modeling using deterministic cellular automata, Monte Carlo simulations of models derived from ferromagnetic models (usually Ising and Potts), mean-field approaches and diffusion-reaction processes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].…”

Scaling and Universality in Proportional Elections

“…In this spirit, microscopic models have been recently proposed to account for collective social phenomena, like the formation of consensus on a specific topic [5,6,7], the creation of common cultural traits and their dissemination [8], the origin and evolution of language [9,10], etc. While models are studied quantitatively in great detail, the comparison with real-world social phenomena is often merely qualitative and on this account it is not possible to make a real discrimination between competing models.…”