  Resilience and vulnerability of societies to large-scale events such as wars,
climate catastrophes, immigration waves, and institutional collapses is not
well-understood. Some societies prove more resilient, while others collapse.
Diversity has been proposed in the literature as a potential cause of
resilience in areas such as ecology, computer science and biology, and could
also be a potential factor in sociocultural contexts. Using CulSim (Ulloa
2016), a cultural simulator that enables the study of cultural complexity and
diversity based on Axelrod's (1997b) model of local convergence and global
polarization and its extension including institutions (Ulloa et al 2016), the
resilience of diverse societies and monocultural societies to nine different
types of events is compared, while varying event sizes and distributions.
Results show a strong positive relation between cultural diversity and
resilience, in particular for events such as foreign invasions and settlements,
and institutional damage and conversion.
