Dynamic Social Impact: The Creation of Culture by Communication.

I propose a dynamic theory of social impact to account for how coherent structures of cultural elements emerge from the interactions of people located in space. In this conception, social structure is seen to result from individuals, differing in their ability to influence each other and in their spatial location, affecting each other in a dynamic iterative process of reciprocal and recursive influence. I will show that the tendency for people to be more influenced by nearby rather than faraway people gives rise to local patterns of consensus in attitudes, values, practices, identities, and meanings that can be interpreted as subcultures. These self-organizing properties can lead initially random distributions of social attributes to become clustered in space and correlated, with less popular elements becoming consolidated or reduced in frequency but surviving in minority subgroups. Dynamic social impact theory thus provides a view of cultures as complex systems exhibiting four forms of self-organization: clustering, correlation, consolidation, and continuing diversity. This paper will attempt to account for how culture could emerge from individual experience and everyday interaction. By culture, I mean the entire set of socially transmitted beliefs, values, and practices that characterize a given society at a given time. These shared ideas and habits produce the concrete manifestations of a particular culture, its religious doctrines and ceremonies, its etiquette and cuisine, its politics and ways of speech. Such elements become combined in coherent if not logically necessitated sets or patterns of related ideas, similar to the entities termed “social representations” by Moscovici (1984b). Culture provides a common understanding transcending immediate individual experience, a social reality to guide our actions. I suggest that simple social scientific principles, as expressed in dynamic social impact theory (Latang, 1981; LatanC, 1996a), may help explain how culture comes about. Dynamic social impact theory is based on a view of society as a self-organizing complex system composed of interacting individuals each obeying simple principles of social impact. It can be described with five propositions.