Abstract
We present a network agent-based model of ethnocentrism and intergroup cooperation in which agents from two groups (majority and minority) change their communality (feeling of group solidarity), cooperation strategy and social ties, depending on a barrier of “likeness” (affinity). Our purpose was to study the model’s capability for describing how the mechanisms of preexisting markers (or “tags”) that can work as cues for inducing in-group bias, imitation, and reaction to non-cooperating agents, lead to ethnocentrism or intergroup cooperation and influence the formation of the network of mixed ties between agents of different groups. We explored the model’s behavior via four experiments in which we studied the combined effects of “likeness,” relative size of the minority group, degree of connectivity of the social network, game difficulty (strength) and relative frequencies of strategy revision and structural adaptation. The parameters that have a stronger influence on the emerging dominant strategies and the formation of mixed ties in the social network are the group-tag barrier, the frequency with which agents react to adverse partners, and the game difficulty. The relative size of the minority group also plays a role in increasing the percentage of mixed ties in the social network. This is consistent with the intergroup ties being dependent on the “arena” of contact (with progressively stronger barriers from e.g. workmates to close relatives), and with measures that hinder intergroup contact also hindering mutual cooperation.
Highlights
Ethnocentrism can be defined as the tendency for behaving differently towards people belonging to the same group than towards people belonging to some other group (LeVine and Campbell 1972)
Agents belong to two groups, defined by a group tag with values “blue” and “green” for majority and minority groups, respectively. They have an attribute called “communality,” which in abstract stands for “feeling of group solidarity, ” and that we model as the payoff of a social dilemma game as described
In this work we presented a network agent-based models (ABMs) of “abstract” type for describing the co-evolution of ethnocentrism and social ties between two groups
Summary
Ethnocentrism can be defined as the tendency for behaving differently towards people belonging to the same group (in-group) than towards people belonging to some other group (out-group) (LeVine and Campbell 1972). It can be considered as a form of in-group bias, or as a tendency for cooperating with in-group members but not with outgroup members (Brewer 1999). Ethnocentrism is an ubiquitous behavioral pattern in societies, which not necessarily implying hostility towards out-groups (xenophobia) is related to social phenomena ranging from voting behavior (Kinder 1998), to segregation and discrimination towards minority groups (Perreault and Bourhis 1999), and even ethnic conflict (Brewer 1979; Chirot and Seligman 2001) and war (van der Dennen 1995). It is well known that this can be triggered even by minimal cues that set arbitrary group boundaries (Tajfel et al 1971; Doise et al 1972; Ahmed 2007), and that inequality hinders intergroup interactions while heterogeneity promotes them (Blau 1977)
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