Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications

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    Diversity and Community Can Coexist
    Stivala, A ; Robins, G ; Kashima, Y ; Kirley, M (WILEY, 2016-03)
    We examine the (in)compatibility of diversity and sense of community by means of agent-based models based on the well-known Schelling model of residential segregation and Axelrod model of cultural dissemination. We find that diversity and highly clustered social networks, on the assumptions of social tie formation based on spatial proximity and homophily, are incompatible when agent features are immutable, and this holds even for multiple independent features. We include both mutable and immutable features into a model that integrates Schelling and Axelrod models, and we find that even for multiple independent features, diversity and highly clustered social networks can be incompatible on the assumptions of social tie formation based on spatial proximity and homophily. However, this incompatibility breaks down when cultural diversity can be sufficiently large, at which point diversity and clustering need not be negatively correlated. This implies that segregation based on immutable characteristics such as race can possibly be overcome by sufficient similarity on mutable characteristics based on culture, which are subject to a process of social influence, provided a sufficiently large "scope of cultural possibilities" exists.
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    Norm Talk and Human Cooperation: Can We Talk Ourselves Into Cooperation?
    Shank, DB ; Kashima, Y ; Peters, K ; Li, Y ; Robins, G ; Kirley, M (AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC, 2019-07)
    Norm talk is verbal communication that explicitly states or implicitly implies a social norm. To investigate its ability to shape cultural dynamics, 2 types of norm talk were examined: injunction, which explicitly states what should be done, and gossip, which implies a norm by stating an action approved or disapproved of by the communicator. In 2 experiments, participants engaged in norm talk in repeated public goods games. Norm talk was found to help sustain cooperation relative to the control condition; immediately after every norm talk opportunity, cooperation spiked, followed by a gradual decline. Despite the macrolevel uniformity in their effects on cooperation, evidence suggests different microlevel mechanisms for the cooperation-enhancing effects of injunction and gossip. A 3rd study confirmed that both injunction and gossip sustain cooperation by making salient the norm of cooperation, but injunction also effects mutual verification of the communicated norm, whereas gossip emphasizes its reputational implications by linking cooperation to status conferral and noncooperation to reputational damage. A 4th experiment provided additional evidence that norm talk was superior to the promise of conditional cooperation in sustaining cooperation. Implications of the findings for cultural dynamics are discussed in terms of how feelings of shared morality, language-based interpersonal communication, and ritualization of norm communication contribute to social regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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    Modeling cultural dynamics
    Kashima, Y ; Kirley, M ; Stivala, A ; Robins, G ; Vallacher, RR ; Read, SJ ; Nowak, A (Routledge, 2017)
    This chapter provides a broad and selective introduction to diverse literatures on computational approaches to cultural dynamics. It explains the social psychological models of cultural dynamics, and then move to two prominent approaches to cultural dynamics— Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination and evolutionary game theoretic approaches to evolution of cooperation. These approaches focus on complementary aspects of cultural dynamics, and that each has unique strengths in dealing with some aspects, but not others. The Axelrod model has been used to explore the dynamics deriving from transmissions of cultural information and the role of drift and to some extent of importation; however, it does not address invention, or most importantly, selection. The evolutionary game theoretic approaches have a unique strength in examining the importance of the selection process in cultural evolution. The chapter discusses how the existing approaches complement each other, and also point to the gap in the existing theory— neither has addressed the process of invention.
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    Ultrametric distribution of culture vectors in an extended Axelrod model of cultural dissemination
    Stivala, A ; Robins, G ; Kashima, Y ; Kirley, M (NATURE PORTFOLIO, 2014-05-02)
    The Axelrod model of cultural diffusion is an apparently simple model that is capable of complex behaviour. A recent work used a real-world dataset of opinions as initial conditions, demonstrating the effects of the ultrametric distribution of empirical opinion vectors in promoting cultural diversity in the model. Here we quantify the degree of ultrametricity of the initial culture vectors and investigate the effect of varying degrees of ultrametricity on the absorbing state of both a simple and extended model. Unlike the simple model, ultrametricity alone is not sufficient to sustain long-term diversity in the extended Axelrod model; rather, the initial conditions must also have sufficiently large variance in intervector distances. Further, we find that a scheme for evolving synthetic opinion vectors from cultural "prototypes" shows the same behaviour as real opinion data in maintaining cultural diversity in the extended model; whereas neutral evolution of cultural vectors does not.