Cultural fragmentation and innovation diffusion in a dynamic scenario

Abstract

Axelrod model describes the dissemination of a set of cultural traits in a society constituted by individual agents. In a social context, nevertheless, individual choices toward a specific attitude are also at the basis of the formation of communities, groups, parties. The membership in a group changes completely the behavior of single agents who start acting according to a social identity. Groups act and interact among them as single entities, but still conserve an internal dynamics. We show that, under certain conditions on social dynamics, the introduction of group dynamics in a cultural dissemination process avoids the flattening of the culture on a single thought and preserve the multiplicity of cultural attitudes. We also considered an innovation diffusion process on this dynamical background, showing under which conditions innovative ideas can survive in a scenario where the groups choices determine the social structure.

References in corpus (9)

• Community structure in social and biological networks
• Cooperative Game Theory Approaches for Network Partitioning
• Dynamics of person-to-person interactions from distributed RFID sensor networks
• High resolution dynamical mapping of social interactions with active RFID
• Homophily, Cultural Drift and the Co-Evolution of Cultural Groups
• Transmission of Information and Herd Behavior: an Application to Financial Markets
• Microscopic Abrams-Strogatz model of language competition
• Universal patterns underlying ongoing wars and terrorism
• Internal network dynamics prolong a losing battle