Cultural Dissemination: An Agent-Based Model with Social Influence

Abstract

We study cultural dissemination in the context of an Axelrod-like agent-based model describing the spread of cultural traits across a society, with an added element of social influence. Thismodification produces absorbing states exhibiting greater variation in number and size of distinct cultural regions compared to the original Axelrodmodel, and we identify the mechanism responsible for this amplification in heterogeneity. We develop several new metrics to quantitatively characterize the heterogeneity and geometric qualities of these absorbing states. Additionally, we examine the dynamical approach to absorbing states in both our Social Influence Model as well as the Axelrod Model, which not only yields interesting insights into the di erences in behavior of the twomodels over time, but also provides amore comprehensive view into the behavior of Axelrod’s originalmodel. Thequantitativemetrics introduced in this paperhavebroadpotential applicability across a large variety of agent-based cultural dissemination models.