Home▸Society & Economics▸Cultural Diffusion Simulator — Axelrod's Model of Cultural Dissemination

Cultural Diffusion Simulator — Axelrod's Model of Cultural Dissemination

Interactive 3D grid model of how local imitation between neighbors — Robert Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination — produces stable regions of shared culture from initial random diversity, or fragments into many isolated cultural zones depending on trait diversity.

Society & Economics3DModerate60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 2D version

How does a population made of purely local, purely imitative interactions end up with a small number of stable, internally-uniform cultural regions instead of either one smooth blend or total noise? This simulator renders Robert Axelrod's classic agent-based model of cultural dissemination as a live 3D grid: every agent carries a vector of cultural features, interacts only with its immediate neighbors, and copies a neighbor's trait with probability equal to how similar they already are. Watch random initial diversity settle into sharp-edged cultural domains in real time, tune the size of the trait pool to cross the model's polarization threshold, and read off the number of distinct regions, the largest region's share of the population, and the average neighbor overlap as the dynamics run.

⚙ Under the hood

An interactive 3D grid model of Robert Axelrod's cultural dissemination dynamics: agents copy a neighbor's cultural trait with probability equal to how similar they already are, turning random initial diversity into stable regions of shared culture — or, above a critical trait-diversity threshold, into many permanently distinct cultural zones.

cultural studiessociologyagent-based modelcultural diffusionsocial dynamicsanthropology

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install