Abstract
Despite the presence of increasing pressure towards globalisation, the coexistence of different cultures is a distinctive feature of human societies. However, how multiculturality can emerge in a population of individuals inclined to imitation, and how it remains stable under cultural drift, i.e. the spontaneous mutation of traits in the population, still needs to be understood. To solve such a problem, we propose here a microscopic model of culture dissemination which takes into account that, in real social systems, the interactions are organised in various layers corresponding to different interests or topics. We show that the addition of multiplexity in the modeling of our society generates qualitatively novel dynamical behavior, producing a new stable regime of cultural diversity. This finding suggests that the layered organisation of social influence typical of modern societies is the key ingredient to explain why and how multiculturality emerges and thrives in our world.
Highlights
Our understanding of societies, and social dynamics more generally, is increasingly taking advantage of concepts, models and methods from statistical and computational physics[1, 2]
In the original model the state of individuals is not described through a scalar variable, but each agent is endowed with a set of Fcultural features, each of them taking one of q different cultural traits
We find that layered social influence in synthetic and empirical multiplex networks with heterogeneous layers leads to a global state of cultural diversity
Summary
Social dynamics more generally, is increasingly taking advantage of concepts, models and methods from statistical and computational physics[1, 2]. A quantitative analysis of the model[12] unveiled a non-equilibrium phase transition at a critical number of cultural traits qc from a mono-cultural phase (global culture) to a polarized or multicultural phase, where several groups with different cultural traits survive Such phenomenon has been observed for realistic interaction patterns, such as small-world networks and heterogeneous distributions of the connections among the individuals[13]. Other alternative proposals focus on modifications of the form of the local interactions, for instance based on assimilation-contrast theory[17], known as bounded confidence[18,19,20] It has been shown how by integrating metric cultural states[21,22,23], as opposed to nominal states, the bounded confidence mechanism can lead to robust cultural diversity[24]. We remark that the multiplex topology has been already successfully applied in other types of social dynamics, such as opinion formation, giving rise to novel critical behavior[40, 41]
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