Selective advantage of tolerant cultural traits in the Axelrod-Schelling model.

The Axelrod-Schelling model incorporates into the original Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination the possibility that cultural agents placed in culturally dissimilar environments move to other places, the strength of this mobility being controlled by an intolerance parameter. By allowing heterogeneity in the intolerance of cultural agents, and considering it as a cultural feature, i.e., susceptible of cultural transmission (thus breaking the original symmetry of Axelrod-Schelling dynamics), we address here the question of whether tolerant or intolerant traits are more likely to become dominant in the long-term cultural dynamics. Our results show that tolerant traits possess a clear selective advantage in the framework of the Axelrod-Schelling model. We show that the reason for this selective advantage is the development, as time evolves, of a positive correlation between the number of neighbors that an agent has in its environment and its tolerant character.