For our modeling purposes, we modify the 2D BCR model in three ways. First, to make the model more realistic by letting agents to interact in a social network structure in which each agent has limited number of neighbors. While in 2D BCR model agents are allowed to interact with any random agent in the population, we limit this communication to only their immediate neighbors. Second, to capture the group identification mechanism, we randomly assign all agents to m different groups. Third, we modify the belief updating rule to incorporate empirical findings from social psychology literature. In general, the findings state that escalation of the perceived intergroup tensions leads individuals to differentiate more from out-groups (Deschamps and Brown 1983; Brown et al. 1986). In our proposed model, we assume that a tension between groups exist a priori in the population. Moreover, since the findings just held true for “differentiating beliefs”, we assume that x1 and x2 are differentiating beliefs.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.comses.net/codebases/4154/releases/1.1.0/