Related papers: Leaders and obstacles raise cultural boundaries

One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…

Natural and artificial collectives exhibit heterogeneities across different dimensions, contributing to the complexity of their behavior. We investigate the effect of two such heterogeneities on collective opinion dynamics: heterogeneity of…

Hofstede's six cultural dimensions make it possible to measure the culture of countries but are criticized for assuming the homogeneity of each country. In this paper, we propose two measures based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions which…

We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…

The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…

Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at…

We present an extensive study of the joint effects of heterogeneous social agents and their heterogeneous social links in a bounded confidence opinion dynamics model. The full phase diagram of the model is explored for two different…

Understanding the emergence of inequality in complex systems requires attention to both structural dynamics and intrinsic heterogeneity. In the context of opinion dynamics, traditional models relied on static snapshots or assumed…

Models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence show a sharp transition between a consensus and a polarization phase at a critical global bound of confidence. In this paper, heterogeneous bounds of confidence are studied. The…

An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to…

Axelrod's model for the dissemination of culture combines two key ingredients of social dynamics: social influence, through which people become more similar when they interact, and homophily, which is the tendency of individuals to interact…

A broad set of empirical phenomenon in the study of social, economic and machine behaviour can be modelled as complex systems with averaging dynamics. However many of these models naturally result in consensus or consensus-like outcomes. In…

Social fragmentation caused by widening differences among constituents has recently become a highly relevant issue to our modern society. Theoretical models of social fragmentation using the adaptive network framework have been proposed and…

The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural…

In studies of cultural differentiation, the joint mechanisms of homophily and influence have been able to explain how distinct cultural groups can form. While these mechanisms normally lead to cultural convergence, increased levels of…

In this work, we investigate interactions that simultaneously order a system locally, while keeping it globally disordered. The study is done in the context of the emergence of diversity in opinion propagation models with interactions…

We propose an opinion model based on agents located at the vertices of a regular lattice. Each agent has an independent opinion (among an arbitrary, but fixed, number of choices) and its own degree of conviction. The latter changes every…

We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with…

Innovation is fundamental for development and provides a competitive advantage for societies. It is the process of creating more complex technologies, ideas, or protocols from existing ones. While innovation may be created by single agents…

We aim to study through an agent-based model the cultural conditions leading to a decrease or an increase of discrimination between groups after a major cultural threat such as a terrorist attack. We propose an agent-based model of cultural…