Abstract
We introduce a Schelling model in which people are modelled as agents following simple behavioural rules which dictate their tolerance to others, their corresponding preference for particular locations, and in turn their movement through a geographic or social space. Our innovation over previous work is to allow agents to adapt their tolerance to others in response to their local environment, in line with contemporary theories from social psychology. We show that adaptive tolerance leads to a polarization in tolerance levels, with distinct modes at either extreme of the distribution. Moreover, agents self-organize into communities of like-tolerance, just as they congregate with those of same colour. Our results are robust not only to variations in free parameters, but also experimental treatments in which migrants are dynamically introduced into the native population. We argue that this model provides one possible parsimonious explanation of the political landscape circa 2016.
Highlights
In this paper we model the adaptation of tolerance in reaction to migration flows into an existing population by drawing on related work from social psychology and political science
Our modelling work contributes insights both to sociology and political science, which we discuss in turn below
From the perspective of sociology, our results highlight the importance of minority and majority situations, which is corroborated by other studies [20]
Summary
In this paper we model the adaptation of tolerance in reaction to migration flows into an existing population by drawing on related work from social psychology and political science. Perceived threats to society and culture from immigrants are worrying large amounts of voters across Europe [1]. Actual numbers of migrants do not predict perceived threat [2, 4], but perceived numbers do [4] This can help explain why anti-immigration attitudes are often high in areas with low migration: following the Brexit referendum in 2016, [5] have examined the demographics of voters. They find a negative relationship between EU migration and support for leaving the EU: “of the 20
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