NetLogo User Community Models

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## WHAT IS IT?

Immigrant studies have become a popular psychosocial area to study and their impact to the current society is one of the topics.There are studies about segregation, especially in those societies with immigrants. While social influence is a model to understand how individuals could influence each other through dynamic interactions. Instead of solely looking at segregation or social influence seperately, this model is built to examine the pattern of social change by assuming the social segregation and influence occur at the same time. It's designed to examine the quantity, quality of immigrants and impacts caused to the society. The attitudes toward in-group and out-group, the proportion of immigrants, the quality of immigrants (leader-like characteristics which represent the degree of individual's influencial ability) are the variables used in this model. Different values of these variables could cause the social pattern changes in different manner.

## HOW IT WORKS

There are four types of turtles, red representing leaders of immigrants, orange representing normal individuals of immigrants, blue representing leaders locals, cyan representing normal individuals of locals.
After setup the percentage of similar wanted will be calculated and compared with the percentage set by users. If turtles are satisfied with their current location, then social influence will be calculated.For every turtle, if in-group influence less than out-group influence, they will change to the opposite group as they are assimilated by the out-group members. As the change of identity, turtles may need to change their location as current location is not satisfying anymore.This pattern of changing will run until the society become stable.

## HOW TO USE IT

Before setup, users need to set the "Empty-Rate", "Imm-percentage", "Percent-Similar-Wanted","Leaders-percentage-Loc", "Leaders-percentage-Imm", "Leader-Strth" and "Normal-Strth".
"Empty-Rate" is used to adjust the quantity of total turtles.
"Imm-percentage" is used to adjust the proportion of immigrants in the society.
"Percent-Similar-Wanted" is used to define the attitudes toward in-groups and out-groups. Smaller number stands for more postitive attitude toward immigrants.
"Leaders-percentage-Loc" is used to set the leader percentage of locals.
"Leaders-percentage-Imm" is used to set the leader percentage of immigrants.
"Leader-Strth" and "Normal-Strth" are used to set the influential ability of leaders and normals.

## THINGS TO NOTICE

The numbers of these four types of turtles and pattern of changing.

## THINGS TO TRY

What is the pattern of changing if empty rate set to be 1?
What is the pattern of changing if immigrants percentage is relatively low/high?
What is the pattern of changing if the leaders percentage is high in one group while low in another group?

## EXTENDING THE MODEL

More types of turtles can be added in, which make the society more complex. In real society, there are variety kinds of people with different influential abilities, not only two types as shown in this model. Will it make any difference when there are more types of individuals with variety influential abilities ?

## RELATED MODELS

"Segregation" and "Voting" model are the reference models from model library.

## CREDITS AND REFERENCES

Nigel, G., & Pietro, T. (2000). How to build and use agent-based models in social science. Mind & Society, 1, 57-72.
Vallacher, R., R., & Nowak, A.(1994).Dynamical Systems in Social Psychology.San Diego, CA, US: Academic Press.