Dissemination Model

From CasGroup

The Dissemination Model describes the emergence of culture. Culture means here the differences between individuals and groups which continue to exist in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. It was created by Robert Axelrod. The model shows how local convergence can create global polarization of cultural "traits".

In the model the agents are placed at fixed sites. The basic premise is that the more similar an agent is to a neighbor, the more likely that that agent will adopt one of the neighbor's traits:

• step1: at random, pick a site to be active, and pick one of its neighbors
• step2: with probability equal to their cultural similarity, these two sites interact. An interaction consists of selecting at random a feature on which the active site and its neighbor differ (if there is one) and changing the active site's trait on this feature to the neighbor's trait on this feature

Links

• Axelrod's paper about The Dissemination of Culture