Simulation of Social Capital Dynamics: Impact of Cultural Events

In the modern multicultural, globalizing, and simultaneously locally radicalizing world, evident limitations of understanding the cultural impact on even basic social capital processes open up a complex and challenging research frontier. Cultural policy experiments are time-consuming, too costly, and risky. Thus, there is a clear need to have feasible simulation models, which could help to foresee some consequences of social and cultural policies. However, there is a lack of available metrics, conceptual approaches, not to mention simulation models. In this paper, we present a scaled-down simulation of stylized cultural events' impact on social capital dynamics using NetLogo agent-based simulation model. The presented abstract model of social capital dynamics is based on well-known principles of Axelrod's model for culture dissemination, which we expanded for the agents' interaction not only in the physical space but also in the cultural features' space as well. Due to the added extensions, the presented simulation model is capable of simulating the impact of broadcasted cultural events. It is aimed to model not only neighborhood (pair-to-pair) interactions between simulated agents but also larger-scale social networking and mass media impact. Simulation results, among other things, reveal a plausible mechanism of culture impact to social capital, and cultural conditions for the emergence of various social cohesion states like globalization, polarization, or radicalization.