Effects of Mass Media action on the Axelrod Model with Social Influence

TL;DR

This paper extends the Axelrod model by incorporating mass media influence through a super-agent, analyzing how various parameters affect cultural dissemination and diversity in social systems.

Contribution

It introduces a super-agent representing mass media into the Axelrod model with social influence, exploring its effects on cultural diversity and convergence.

Findings

Mass media influence can promote cultural convergence or diversity depending on parameters.

Initial social diversity and mass media strength significantly affect outcomes.

The model's results are relevant for understanding collective behavior in social systems.

Abstract

The use of {\it dyadic interaction} between agents, in combination with {\it homophily} (the principle that ``likes attract'') in the Axelrod model for the study of cultural dissemination has two important problems: the prediction of monoculture in large societies and an extremely narrow window of noise levels in which diversity with local convergence is obtained. Recently, the inclusion of {\it social influence} has proven to overcome them (A. Flache and M. W. Macey, arXiv:0808.2710). Here we extend the Axelrod model with social influence interaction for the study of Mass Media effects through the inclusion of a super-agent which acts over the whole system and has nonnull overlap with each agent of the society. The dependence with different parameters as the initial social diversity, size effects, Mass Media strength and noise is outlined. Our results might be relevant in several socio-economic contexts and for the study of the emergence of collective behavior in complex social systems.