How does diversity seeking attitude of individuals affect trustworthiness of a society

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1649237 (Table of Contents)

In this thesis, we assume that there is a population of individuals, whom we refer to as agents. In our model, two types of agents exist. We think of the two types as representing some immutable characteristic, for example, race or ethnicity. Schelling assumed that there is a threshold t common to all agents: if an agent discovers that less than t of its neighbors are of the same type as itself, then it has an interest in moving to a new cell (Schelling, 1971). This simple model of Schelling illustrates how the forces leading to segregation (phase separation) are remarkably robust. Even if people only have a mild preference for living with neighbors of the same color, a significant level of segregation may occur. Inspired from the fact that some respondents want to live in mixed neighborhoods rather than where there are mostly populated by the same color, we included in the model an upper bound of like-colored agents for each agent's satisfaction function (Gunes, 2015). In our model, therefore, the agents are not only tolerant to opposite colors, but deliberately seek diversity. A real–life counterpart of this diversity desire is that in multi–ethnic communities where the agents reportedly said that they want their children to learn to get along with others. In our work, we aimed to analyze the effect of this new preference on trustworthiness between agents’ similar–like neighbors. We also introduce several measures to quantify different patterns emerging from both tolerant and diversity seeking agents. The conventional segregation measures cannot appreciate the differences. We also generate a new model to introduce a new agent type where we called them as refugees to get an insight related to migration and refugee problem.