The origin of the oppositional patterns of cultural diversity in different levels

Abstract

The evolution of cultural diversity in some social systems can be observed as the oppositional patterns in different levels, namely, the directions of the trends of diversity in different levels are opposite. In this paper, we propose a payoff-driven metapopulation modeling framework to investigate the origin of the oppositional patterns in the trends of cultural diversity. This model considers the mobile agents in multiple communities, and the cultural characteristics of an agent are represented by a vector. The diffusion of cultural characteristics is driven by two opposite effects: the communication cost positively depending on cultural difference between agents, and the cultural attractiveness single-peak-functional correlating on cultural difference. In the numerical simulations of the model, the polarization is observed in the case with the homophily principle, and two types of the oppositional patterns can emerge in the case with time-varying mobility of agents. These findings efficiently explain the emergence of the oppositional patterns and help to understand the evolution of diversity under the dynamics of both synchronization and variation.