On the Coevolution of Stereotype, Culture, and Social Relationships

Abstract

The theory of constructuralism describes how shared knowledge, representative of cultural forms, develops between individuals through social interaction. Constructuralism argues that through interaction and individual learning, the social network (who interacts with whom) and the knowledge network (who knows what) coevolve. In the present work, we extend the theory of constructuralism and implement this extension in an agent-based model (ABM). Our work focuses on the theory's inability to describe how people form and utilize stereotypes of higher order social structures, in particular observable social groups and society as a whole. In our ABM, we formalize this theoretical extension by creating agents that construct, adapt, and utilize social stereotypes of individuals, social groups, and society. We then use this model to carry out a virtual experiment that explores how ethnocentric stereotypes and the underlying distribution of culture in an artificial society interact to produce varying levels of social relationships across social groups. In general, we find that neither stereotypes nor the form of underlying cultural structures alone are sufficient to explain the extent of social relationships across social groups. Rather, we provide evidence that shared culture, social relations, and group stereotypes all intermingle to produce macrosocial structure.

Deterring the development and use of nuclear weapons: a multi-level modeling approach

“…The key theories employed are Constructuralism, 32 social influence theory, 33 and a theory of social cognition. 34 Constructuralism posits that the web of affiliations connecting actors evolves as those actors share information with actors they interact with, forget information, and infer beliefs of other actors. Social influence theory posits that actors base their decisions on their beliefs, which in turn are influenced by the beliefs of those with whom the actor interacts.…”

“…Agents also choose to adjust their own beliefs due to their own knowledge as well as their perception of the beliefs of others. Social cognition posits that these actors form perceptions about both specific individuals and groups 34 of individuals. Further, it posits that when an actor interacts with another, the first will, lacking specific data, form a perception of the second based on the second’s known group affiliations.…”

Characterizing network dynamics of online hate communities around the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Social networks, moreover, are seen to co-evolve with knowledge structures or cultural norms (Joseph et al. 2014 , 2016 ). In other words, as patterns of interconnection between agents shift, so do the relationships between the ideas they exchange.…”

“…Informed by constructural theory, we extend prevailing computational approaches for hate speech identification by attending to its socially situated spread within evolving social networks (Carley 1991 , 1989 , 1995 ; Joseph et al. 2014 ). Examining Twitter conversations about the pandemic in the Philippines and the United States, we formulate methods for characterizing online hate speech and the communities which propagate it over time (Uyheng et al.…”

Rosalind’s Ghost: Biology, Collaboration, and the Female

“…Yet after many years, disparities stubbornly persist. New methods in social science modeling, such as those being conducted by Kathleen Carley [14], could potentially build agent-based models with various of these assumptions to see which are more determinant of unequal outcomes, and attention can be paid there.…”