Agent-based Models: A Methodological Tool to Investigate the Emergence of Multicultural Societies

Multiculturalism is a complex topic studied by different disciplines and perspectives. While studies in psychology of acculturation have focused on the experiences and orientations of individuals, sociological studies in immigrant integration have focused on their dynamic incorporation into the receiving society’s structures and fabric. Both perspectives are relevant to the understanding of multicultural societies’ functioning and formation, which justifies the adoption of a systemic and emergent perspective. This means that the occurrence of social phenomena as multicultural society formation cannot be reduced to the knowledge of their individual components and characteristics (e.g. individual orientations), but emerges from their mechanisms of interaction within a dynamic and circular causality. Agent-based models can be a suitable tool to this aim. As a class of computer simulations, they implement multiple and interacting human-like agents provided with attitudes and cognitions into virtual scenarios. Thereby, theoretical assumptions are translated into mechanisms of interactions linking the micro-level of individual behavior to the macro-level of society formation. The flexibility of agent-based models allows to integrate a diversity of disciplines and perspectives as well as to investigate experimental conditions otherwise unfeasible in what if scenarios. Hartmut Esser’s Intergenerational Integration Model perfectly fits such premises, theorizing about the interaction of previous generations with basic conditions of ethnic boundaries and group diversity as premises for new migrants’ integration either into local or ethnic communities. Agent-based modeling can help identify the actual initial conditions favoring the emergence of segregated or cohesive multicultural societies.