Interactional Affordances and the Hinge of Cultural Change

• In Event: Formal Models and Methods for the Study of Culture and Meaning (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Culture Section)

Abstract

How do interactional regimes condition the operation of cultural mechanisms? We develop a formal and computational framework showing that shifts in interactional affordances systematically reweight the relative influence of social transmission and cognitive constraint in belief change.

Using longitudinal network data from the Seminary to Early Ministry Study, we construct six empirically grounded agent-based models (ABMs) that vary two core mechanisms: (1) exposure-based transmission and (2) cognitive constraint implemented either as population-level schemas or locally learned associative structures. All models share identical empirical network structures and initial belief vectors. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an exogenous shift from embodied to mediated interactional regimes, allowing us to evaluate how identical formal mechanisms perform under distinct interactional conditions. Rather than estimating the total effect of regime change, we treat ABMs as theory-adjudication devices. We compare model specifications using fixed-effects difference-in-differences contrasts that isolate regime-dependent shifts in predictive performance. This design allows us to identify whether interactional regimes selectively condition the comparative explanatory power of transmission and constraint mechanisms.

Across regimes, models incorporating structured transmission and coherence outperform belief stability. However, mediated interaction disproportionately attenuates the contribution of interpersonal transmission and relationally learned schemas, while population-level constraint remains comparatively stable. These findings indicate that interactional regimes function as meso-level modulators of cultural mechanisms, altering which micro-level update rules scale into macro-level belief alignment.mThe paper contributes a formal framework linking interactional sociology to computational models of cultural evolution. By showing that identical generative mechanisms yield different macro outcomes across regimes, we demonstrate that interactional affordances are not merely contextual features but structural parameters governing cultural dynamics.

Authors

• Josh Gaghan, Duke University

• Craig M. Rawlings, Duke University