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Abstract
Emulation is one of the simplest and most common mechanisms of social interaction. In this paper we introduce a descriptive computational model that attempts to capture the underlying dynamics of social processes led by emulation. The model allows, with few assumptions, to explain how and why highly skewed distributions emerge in human societies, where few trends are representative and co-exist with several minority trends. In particular, the model shows that if a society is too tolerant and permeable, all the agents converge to only one trend that leads to uniformity. If society's tolerance is moderate, many trends arise but with a high dispersity of size, only a few of them being truly representative. Finally, in highly intolerant societies a considerable degree of segregation is reached, where lots of trends of similar size arise. Furthermore, the proposed model can reproduce several real phenomena in social processes in which emulation is present: cyclic evolution in trend areas, changes in leadership, extinction and resurgence of trend areas, the struggle between neighboring areas and the higher probability of having dominant trends in central areas, corresponding to moderate positions.
Highlights
1.1 Emulation is one of the simplest and most common mechanisms of social interaction
Our model lets us state which conditions lead to a consensus, and sheds some light on other interesting questions such as defining the main factor that determines the number of trends and their size in a society, establishing which of them are dominant or what is the role of innovation
3.13 The dynamical results of the model seem to be consistent with empirical evidence, as we show using real-world data from the 2007 Andalusia Social Survey, a study based on a random sample of 1850 personal interviews intended to produce comparative data of Andalusia's social reality, and conducted by the Statistical Institute of Andalusia, agency of the Regional Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Science
Summary
1.1 Emulation is one of the simplest and most common mechanisms of social interaction. The dynamism index (which measures the average number of changes in the ranking of representative trends for two consecutive periods of time) depends on p linearly (see Figure 6) In this way, the higher the innovation, the more dynamical and changeable the society becomes. 3.16 As can be seen, where all this information is gathered, the estimated values of α and p faithfully reproduce the number and size (out of 75) of social trends existing in analyzed data for different levels of education, as well as the inequality of trend sizes measured by the Gini coefficient These estimated values are consistent with sociological explanations: better-educated individuals are supposed to be more open-minded, tolerant and they are more likely to interact in a more global way (that is, they have lower values of α ), showing at the same time a higher willingness of innovation (greater values of p). Α does play an important role in the process: both representative and dominant trend areas move away from the center relatively when α increases
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