Inequality and the Emergence of Social Stratification

In this work, we investigate whether differential (unequal) resource access promotes social stratification (the partitioning of a population into hierarchical groups based on socioeconomic factors). We achieve this by conducting scenario experimentation with Neo-COOP, an ABM that utilizes a Cultural Algorithm to simulate the evolution of resource sharing preferences in an artificial society. By varying the agents' initial resource sharing beliefs, the intensity of differential access, and the frequency at which the agents experience environmental stress. We find that while social stratification does increase when differential access increases, the effect is attenuated at the extremes with agents instead favouring an increase in selfish behaviour across the social strata. We also show that the severity (magnitude) of social stratification is most prominent in societies with initially selfish agents regardless of the intensity of differential access. Interestingly, our results also suggest that heterogeneous populations (agents with greater diversity of resource sharing beliefs) exhibit emergent social stratification to a lesser degree than homogenized populations (even in populations where agents are initialized to be altruistic).