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 dynamics inspired from the social psychological theories. An agent has a cultural identity comprised of the most acceptable positions about each of the different cultural worldviews corresponding to the main cultural groups of the considered society and a margin of acceptance around each of these most acceptable positions. An agent forms an attitude about another agent depending on the similarity between their cultural identities. When a terrorist attack is perpetrated in the name of an extreme cultural identity, the negatively perceived agents from this extreme cultural identity modify their margins of acceptance in order to differentiate themselves more from the threatening cultural identity. We generated a set of populations with cultural identities compatible with data given by a survey on groups' attitudes among a large sample representative of the population of France; we then simulated the reaction of these agents facing a threat. For most populations, the average attitude toward agents with the same preferred worldview as the terrorists becomes more negative; however, when the population shows some cultural properties, we noticed the opposite effect as the average attitude of the population becomes less negative. This particular context requires that the agents sharing the same preferred worldview with the terrorists strongly differentiate themselves from the terrorists' extreme cultural identity and that the other agents be aware of these changes.
Cultural worldviews are defined as "shared conceptions of reality" [1,2]. They are an important defense mechanism allowing people to cope with existential threats. This is why people are motivated to maintain faith in them. Terror Management Theory (TMT) has shown that a death fatality reminder, such as a terrorist attack, is a cultural threat or a self-worth threat [3]. Such a threat generally leads to an increase in negative intergroup bias in order to defend one's cultural worldviews [4,5]. However, recent research showed that "increased prejudice and hostility are not an inevitable response to existential threat" [6]. Some cultural properties, when becoming salient simultaneously with the threat, increase perceived similarity of members of different groups, and protect against an increase of the intergroup hostility [6,7]. Understanding when and why people react to a cultural or collective threat one way or the other is a basic problem having widespread theoretical and practical implications. To deal with this paradox, we study how the simulated change of cultural worldviews due to a cultural threat impacts virtual groups' attitudes toward each other. Our agent-based model helps to characterize cultural properties leading to acceptance or hostility between groups.
Agent-based model of culture dynamics have been seminally introduced by Axelrod [8]. The Axelrod model represents a culture as a set of traits and changes an unshared cultural trait by two agents to a shared one, with a probability depending on their level of shared properties. Several variants have been studied [9], introducing also a process leading traits to be more different [8,[10][11][12][13] instead of being shared. However, none of these models consider the impact of an existential threat on the cultural properties in relation with the self-worth and the group dynamics. This conclusion is also true for opinion dynamics model, very close from the cultural models. Though some of them include the possibility of rejecting the other’s opinion instead conforming [12], or some rules for the evolution of the self-worth [14,15], none of them address cultural properties, self-worth and group dynamics in relation to each other.
We model agents facing a cultural threat with dynamics of attitudes inspired by the general principles of the TMT. An agent has a segment of tolerance for each of the main cultural worldviews available in its environment and forms an attitude about the other agents depending on the similarity of acceptance segments about these worldviews. We assume that a terrorist attack is related to some extreme acceptance segments and related attitudes about the worldviews that are perceived as a threat by some agents, leading to differentiation from these extreme positions. These changes in acceptance segments modify the attitudes that the agents have about each other. We initialize the population of agents from aggregated data given by a representative survey on groups’ attitudes conducted in France in 2014 [16] and then we submit it to a virtual threat. We generally observe an increase of hostility toward the group assimilated to the terrorist’s group except in some particular cases where, on the contrary the hostility decreases. We study the evolution of the population in relation to its initial properties and propose some explanations to these variations.
The next section presents the model as well as the material. Then section 2 shows how the model is initialized and parameterized. Section 3 gives details about the evolutions and the related cultural properties. We finally conclude and discuss our results.
Method and materials
This model is based on the idea of cultural worldview given by [3] and inspired by the Social Judgement Theory (SJT) [19]. We now propose an overview of the concepts that we use and their translation into the model.
Cultural worldview. We assume that K cultural worldviews are available in the environment. A cultural worldview is a consistent set of concepts, beliefs, tradi-tions or rituals organizing the world and agent behaviour. For instance we consider Christian, Muslim and areligious worldviews. Agent position about a worldview. Each agent has a most acceptable position about each worldview which is defined on a continuous axis from -1 (very negative), to +1 (very positive). This most acceptable position expresses her attitude about the considered worldview, i.e how much she likes/adheres, or dislikes/rejects it. It can be related to the most acceptable position of the SJT [19].
Note that an agent may have positive most acceptable positions about several worldviews. For instance, an agent can have a high positive most acceptable position for the areligious worldview, and also have a lower positive most acceptable position for Christian or Muslim worldviews. Lower and higher margin of acceptance, acceptance segment of an agent for a worldview. In addition to her position, an agent has margin
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