Modeling Meta-Cultures

In this work, we are exploring mechanisms that may contribute to cultural diversity and that rely on our everyday understanding of culture as a set of attitudes, behaviors, tools, ways of thinking etc., some of which are not directly exposed to the outside. We are using as a starting point an extended Axelrod model that defines a Moore neighborhood and generally heterogeneous sets of cultural features per agent. We briefly present next a number of psychologically realistic, basic and more advanced, conceptual models of selfish cultural affinity perception and imitation that have been shown to make the population stabilize to multi-cultural configurations. The shared individualistic, “selfish” nature of these models leads to the definition of another model explicitly representing non-exposed or hidden features that control regular, exposed features. We show that this meta model induces diversity even in the absence of individualistic behaviors and that an adaptation mechanism capable of slowly imitating control features would drive the system close to its theoretical limits. We also show that in some cases the control features’ adaptation process presents punctuated equilibria. Finally, preliminary experiments with various social configurations have shown that the qualitative cultural characteristics of final populations after stabilization depend solely on the original cultures and not on the type of spatial interaction and contact. Thus in some cases initial cultural divides may persist. In sum, our results show that the presence of meta-processes, and especially of control features that are not exposed to the outside but that moderate other regular features, most often leads to stable multicultural but not polarized populations.