Robustness of cultural communities in an open-ended Axelrod's model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how introducing new cultural features affects the stability of cultural communities in Axelrod's model, combining simulations and mean-field analysis to understand social dynamics.

Contribution

It extends Axelrod's model by incorporating evolving cultural features and analyzes their impact using both Monte-Carlo simulations and mean-field equations.

Findings

Cultural clusters remain stable despite new feature introductions.

Introduction of new topics significantly alters cultural overlap.

Mean-field analysis captures phase transition but underestimates cultural overlap.

Abstract

We consider an open-ended set of cultural features in the Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination. By replacing the features in which a high degree of consensus is achieved by new ones, we address here an essential ingredient of societies: the evolution of topics as a result of social dynamics and debate. Our results show that, once cultural clusters have been formed, the introduction of new topics into the social debate has little effect on them, but it does have a significant influence on the cultural overlap. Along with the Monte-Carlo simulations, we derive and numerically solve an equation for the stationary cultural overlap based on a mean-field approach. Although the mean-field analysis reproduces qualitatively the characteristic phase transition of the Axelrod's model, it underestimates the cultural overlap, highlighting the role of the local interactions in the Axelrod's dynamics, as well as the correlations between the different cultural features.