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You ever see a Game of Life style thing involving that? Even slight preference can rapidly cause segregation. Take a grid where you start out randomly distributing white and black dots. Each square can look at the 4 squares on each side of it. If you suppose that somebody would be reasonably happy living somewhere if at least half of its neighbors are the same color- which on the whole is pretty tolerant, you'd think it'd mean that totally mixed neighborhoods could easily form. So call a square unhappy only if 3 or more of its neighbors aren't its own color, and allow unhappy squares to swap places with other unhappy squares of a different color.
After only a few iterations of swapping things around, you rapidly find these massive neighborhoods of the same color appearing once the system becomes stable. You can think of it as if only one person is unhappy in an area- say because he happens to be a bit more isolated than everybody else- then he leaves, but then the new frontiersman may have just lost his support and is now alone, so he leaves, and you get a vicious cycle as everybody segregates and very firm borders form.
If you crank up the tolerance to requiring only 25% of the people in an area to be the same as you- you don't want to be COMPLETElY alone- then the neighborhoods still form, they just tend to be a bit thinner and the borders more erratic.
You can try it yourself with pennies and nickels on a chessboard. It's not really that computationally heavy and can easily be done yourself. Depressing, but it seems that's how we work. (and if you have a computer, you can of course make it far more complex with huge grids, farther look around, different types of people instead of everybody having the same tolerance threshold, and so on, but the same basic result is there. I remember an intersting computer variant: the Rwanda/LA riots simulation, where you have empty spots too, and populations grow, but packed in people can get antsy and occasionally attack neighbors of the different type. What normally happens is growth, war wherein mixed neighborhoods kill off the minorities, and then a slow war as whichever side ended up with bigger neighborhoods the first time slowly overwhelms the second side. Then you add in police/peacekeepers, whose purpose is to discourage conflict in the area they're at. They don't help mch th first time, but eventually they end up securing the borders around the minority neighborhood, leading to a stable peace solution, since people on the border won't fight. Of course, withdraw the peacekeepers, and watch as they return to their old ways, though.)
After only a few iterations of swapping things around, you rapidly find these massive neighborhoods of the same color appearing once the system becomes stable. You can think of it as if only one person is unhappy in an area- say because he happens to be a bit more isolated than everybody else- then he leaves, but then the new frontiersman may have just lost his support and is now alone, so he leaves, and you get a vicious cycle as everybody segregates and very firm borders form.
If you crank up the tolerance to requiring only 25% of the people in an area to be the same as you- you don't want to be COMPLETElY alone- then the neighborhoods still form, they just tend to be a bit thinner and the borders more erratic.
You can try it yourself with pennies and nickels on a chessboard. It's not really that computationally heavy and can easily be done yourself. Depressing, but it seems that's how we work. (and if you have a computer, you can of course make it far more complex with huge grids, farther look around, different types of people instead of everybody having the same tolerance threshold, and so on, but the same basic result is there. I remember an intersting computer variant: the Rwanda/LA riots simulation, where you have empty spots too, and populations grow, but packed in people can get antsy and occasionally attack neighbors of the different type. What normally happens is growth, war wherein mixed neighborhoods kill off the minorities, and then a slow war as whichever side ended up with bigger neighborhoods the first time slowly overwhelms the second side. Then you add in police/peacekeepers, whose purpose is to discourage conflict in the area they're at. They don't help mch th first time, but eventually they end up securing the borders around the minority neighborhood, leading to a stable peace solution, since people on the border won't fight. Of course, withdraw the peacekeepers, and watch as they return to their old ways, though.)
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