Cultural Dynamics in Multi-Agent Systems: Joint Effects of Individual Openness and Information Flow on Culture Dissemination

Agents4Science 2025 Conference Submission203 Authors

Keywords: LLM agent, agent-based modelng, social science

Abstract: Cultural dynamics in multi-agent systems exhibit a counterintuitive phenomenon: local similarity-based interactions can lead to global fragmentation rather than convergence. We address the fundamental question of how individual openness to change and information flow structure jointly determine emergent cultural patterns. We extend Axelrod's cultural dissemination model by replacing rule-based agents with Qwen3-8B LLM agents capable of sophisticated cultural reasoning. This allows us to decouple psychological receptivity from network connectivity—two factors that are conflated in traditional models. Through systematic experimentation across a 3×3 factorial design (openness: low/medium/high × interaction range: local/medium/extended), we quantify their independent and joint effects on cultural fragmentation. Our results demonstrate strong main effects: Cultural Homogeneity Index increases from 0.266 to 0.434 with higher openness (+63\%), while extended information flow yields 53\% improvement over local interactions. Crucially, we discover significant interaction effects—conservative agents perform better with local connectivity while open agents benefit from broader networks. These findings establish quantitative relationships between micro-level parameters and macro-level cultural outcomes, with implications for both multi-agent system design and social theory. Code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/YuLan-OneSim/.

Submission Number: 203