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Collective dilemmas have attracted widespread interest in several social sciences and the humanities including economics, sociology and philosophy. Since Hardin's intuitive example of the Tragedy of the Commons, many real-world public goods dilemmas have been analysed with a wide ranging set of possible and actual solutions. The plethora of solutions to these dilemmas suggests that people make different kinds of decision in different situations. Rather than trying to find a unifying kind of reasoning to capture all situations, as the paradigm of rationality has done, this article develops a framework of agent decision-making for social simulation, that takes seriously both different kinds of decision making as well as different interpretations of situations. The Contextual Action Framework for Computational Agents (CAFCA) allows for the modelling of complex social phenomena, like dilemma situations, with relatively simple agents by shifting complexity from an agent's cognition to an agent's context.

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We present an analysis for modelling social norms. In social psychology three different normative behaviours have been identified: obedience, conformity and compliance. We show that this triad is a useful conceptualisation of normative behaviour and that current models only ever deal with conformity and obedience two, neglecting compliance. We argue that this is a result from modelling having so far focussed too much on agent behaviour rather than agent knowledge and that cognitive models of normative behaviour are needed to capture this third and arguably most interesting normative behaviour.

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We present DIAL, a model of group dynamics and opinion dynamics. It features dialogues, in which agents gamble about reputation points. Intra-group radicalisation of opinions appears to be an emergent phenomenon. We position this model within the theoretical literature on opinion dynamics and social influence. Moreover, we investigate the effect of argumentation on group structure by simulation experiments. We compare runs of the model with varying influence of the outcome of debates on the reputation of the agents.