On the Axelrod’s social influence model with obstruction

Abstract

People associate and bond with similar others (the principle of homophily). The interactions resulting from these bonds even make them more similar (the principle of social influence). Despite this tendency towards local convergence, cultural diversity is prevalent. Axelrod suggests an agent-based model (called social influence model) to explore the mechanisms of competition between globalization and persistence of cultural diversity. In the model, agents with initial random cultural vectors are placed into a regular lattice and adjacent agents (neighbors) interact in proportion to their shared cultural features (coordinate values). They exchange random features resulting in emergence of local similar cultures. In this study, we extend Axelrod’s model to incorporate the concept of obstruction into the network in the form of a wall and a door on it. Different parameters are defined as the features of the obstruction. In order to investigate the effects of different types of obstructions on the emergence of cultural regions, various wall and door settings (in terms of their locations and the width of the door) are examined in a fixed-sized network for agents with a fixed-length of cultural vector and for various heterogeneity levels (ranges of cultural possibilities). Consistent with earlier work on the Axelrod’s model, the results of the experiments show that the agent’s heterogeneity level q has a significant effect on the level of cultural diversity. A phase transition from a large scaled global culture to many small sized cultures is observed as a function of q. Three regions of q determine to a great extent the effects of obstruction parameters on the outputs. In the region where phase transition is occurred, the level of cultural diversity is more sensitive to the effects of obstruction parameters. In general, the width of the door w has a very limited effect.