Equilibria of culture contact derived from ingroup and outgroup attitudes

TL;DR

This paper presents a mathematical model based on social psychology and statistical physics to analyze how cultural contact and immigration influence societal attitudes and beliefs, highlighting the roles of group legacy and attitudes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mathematical framework to predict cultural outcomes during contact, incorporating social psychology principles and policy implications.

Findings

Cultural change depends on group legacy and attitudes.

In some cases, residents' culture remains stable.

In others, residents adopt immigrant beliefs.

Abstract

Modern societies feature an increasing contact between cultures, yet we have a poor understanding of what the outcomes might be. Here we consider a mathematical model of contact between social groups, grounded in social psychology and analyzed using tools from statistical physics. We use the model to study how a culture might be affected by immigration. We find that in some cases residents' culture is relatively unchanged, but in other cases residents may adopt the opinions and beliefs of immigrants. The decisive factors are each group's cultural legacy and its attitudes towards in- and out-groups. The model can also predict how social policies may influence the outcome of culture contact.