Social Simulation - Topics

Topics

Here are some sample topics that have been explored with social simulation:

• Social norms: Robert Axelrod has used simulations to investigate the foundation of morality; others have modeled the emergence of norms using memes, or how social norms and emotions can regulate each other.

• Institutions: by investigating under what conditions agents manage to coordinate, or by modeling the works of Robert Putnam on civic traditions

• Reputation, for example by making agents with a model of reputation from Pierre Bourdieu (image, social esteem, and prestige) and observing their behavior in a virtual marketplace.

• Knowledge transmission and the social process of science: there is a

• Elections: Kim (2011) has modeled a psychological model of judgement from previous research (notably featuring motivated reasoning), and compared the statistical regularities of the simulation with empirical observations of voter behavior; others have compared delegation methods.

• Economics: see computational economics and agent-based computational economics.