Is it possible to control the spread of a globalized culture?

Abstract

We study a model describing the spread of a globalized culture in a population of individuals localized at the nodes of a social network. The influence of this globalized culture, assumed to be foreign to the local culture, is measured by a probability to convince each individual to adopt its cultural traits. This probability depends upon the degree s--a real between 0 and 1--of ``wise'' skepticism characterizing the personality of each individual and a parameter a representing the resistance of the society as a whole to the spread of the foreign cultural traits. A greater a indicates a stronger resistance of the local culture to globalization. On the other hand, each individual interacts with a random number of other individuals--her cultural neighborhood--uniformly distributed between 1 and a maximum value. The probability distribution of an individual to belong to the cultural neighborhood of another individual has a power-law behavior. A small fraction r of the total population belonging to the tail of this probability distribution have an s-value equal to 1. They represent the most conservative individuals firmly attached to their local culture.