RESEARCH ARTICLE How Does a Divided Population Respond to Change?

Most studies on the response of socioeconomic systems to a sudden shift focus on long-term equilibria or end points. Such narrow focus forgoes many valuable insights. Here we examine the transient dynamics of regime shift on a divided population, exemplified by soci-eties divided ideologically, politically, economically, or technologically. Replicator dynamics is used to investigate the complex transient dynamics of the population response. Though simple, our modeling approach exhibits a surprisingly rich and diverse array of dynamics. Our results highlight the critical roles played by diversity in strategies and the magnitude of the shift. Importantly, it allows for a variety of strategies to arise organically as an integral part of the transient dynamics—as opposed to an independent process—of population response to a regime shift, providing a link between the population's past and future diver-sity patterns. Several combinations of different populations ' strategy distributions and shifts were systematically investigated. Such rich dynamics highlight the challenges of anticipat-ing the response of a divided population to a change. The findings in this paper can poten-tially improve our understanding of a wide range of socio-ecological and technological transitions