Axelrod's second model seeks a deeper understanding of how groups of individuals come to share a common culture, and why the formation of ever-larger cultural units tends to slow or stop. Understanding how a culture becomes established, how it spreads, and how it can be sustained has growing importance in today's world. We applaud the spread of a common culture when it favors efficient communication, prevents unnecessary conflict, and fosters action for global needs such as sustainable growth. Yet we abhor the harm done to peoples whose cultures are destroyed, the loss to the rest of us of the wisdom embodied in those vanishing cultures, and the universal loss of adaptive potential made possible by cultural diversity. The key premise is that people are more likely to be influenced by others who are already relatively similar to themselves.
Emergent properties are stable regions of shared culture.
Similarity leads to interaction, and interaction leads to increased similarity. This process need not lead to complete convergence. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the model is the way it can generate few or many distinct cultural regions depending on the scope of cultural possibilities, the range of the interactions, and the size of the geographic territory. The first and last of these results are quite counterintuitive. Indeed one of the most valuable lessons of this model is that our intuition about very simple dynamic processes can often be quite poor.