The Etiology of Social Change

Abstract

A fundamental aspect of human beings is that they learn. The process of learning and what is learned are impacted by a number of factors, both cognitive and social; that is, humans are boundedly rational. Cognitive and social limitations interact, making it difficult to reason about how to provide information to impact what humans know, believe, and do. Herein, we use a multi-agent dynamicnetwork simulation system, Construct, to conduct such reasoning. In particular, we ask, What media should be used to provide information to most impact what people know, believe, and do, given diverse social structures? All simulated agents are boundedly rational both at the cognitive and social level, and so are subject to factors such as literacy, education, and the breadth of their social network. We find that there is no one most effective intervention; rather, to be effective, messages and the media used to spread the message need to be selected for the population being addressed. Typically, a multimedia campaign is critical.

Simulating Diffusion with Conflicting Knowledge

“…In general, it is known that agents are reluctant to change their knowledge once they have made up their minds [30]. Exceptions to this rule do exist, however, in that people who are perceived as experts are repeatedly consulted for information and may therefore be better able to change the opinions of others [30][31][32].…”

“…In general, it is known that agents are reluctant to change their knowledge once they have made up their minds [30]. Exceptions to this rule do exist, however, in that people who are perceived as experts are repeatedly consulted for information and may therefore be better able to change the opinions of others [30][31][32]. Our experiment disregards the concept of an expert in favor of simplicity, and also simplifies the idea of an agent valuing their current knowledge more than new opinions by giving past knowledge twice the weight of new knowledge coming from his alters.…”

“…Specifically, we use a modified form of the model [12] where an agent has one chance to interact, but will only interact with at most one of his alters. Such a model is a simplification of the model used in Construct, a social simulation tool [30]. The limitation of this model is that the idea of a broadcast, where agents send information to multiple alters at once, is absent.…”

Variables, Decisions, and Scripting in Construct

“…Carley, Martin et al 2009;Hirshman and St. Charles 2009). However, decisions can be used to aggregate simpler information about particular agents in order to facilitate later analysis.…”

“…Additionally, several conference and journal publications may also provide key insight as to how Construct has been used in past research. While the earliest work with the tool focused on defining the constructuralism meta-theory and examining the processes by which subgroups form and change (Carley 1991), work in the late 1990s focused on organizational applications and non-human agents (Carley 1997;Carley 1999); more recent work has focused on building and describing more cognitively complex agents (Hirshman, Martin et al 2008;Carley, Martin et al 2009). While the scripting language described in this technical report is indeed new, it builds off of nearly twenty years of work in Construct input design.…”