English

Diversity in Axelrod's social adaptation model

Physics and Society 2025-07-29 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we study Axelrod's model of social dynamics, introducing the concept of Cultural Diversity (DD), defined as the variety of sizes of clusters or cultural domains formed, which measures the complexity of the system. We find that the maximum of DD agrees with the critical point where the monocultural/multicultural phase transition occurs, tending to a minimum value when the system's degrees of freedom, cultural traits qq, are far from the critical point qcq_c. We show that at qcq_c the entropy also reaches its maximum value, that is, the phase transition for this model is of the order-order type. Thus, multiculturalism is not synonymous with cultural diversity, as is commonly assumed in the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.19757,
  title  = {Diversity in Axelrod's social adaptation model},
  author = {J. Villegas-Febres and E. Castillo-Felisola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.19757},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

11 pages, 8 figures