Context in social simulation: why it can’t be wished away

Abstract

Context is everywhere in the human social and cognitive spheres but it is often implicit and unnoticed. However, when one is involved in trying to understand and model the social and cognitive realms context becomes an important factor. This paper is an analysis of the role and effects of context on social simulation and a call for it to be squarely faced by the social simulation community. It briefly looks at some different kinds of context, and discussed the difficulty of talking about context, before looking at the "context heuristic" that seems to be used in human cognition. This allows for rich and fuzzy context recognition to be combined with crisp 'foreground' belief update and reasoning. Such a heuristic allows for causality to make sense, and limits the phenomena of causal spread-it is thus at the root of the modelling enterprise. This analysis is then applied to simulation modelling, considering the context of a simulation, and its ramifications, in particular, why generalisation is so hard.

The working group performance modeled by a bi-layer cellular automaton

“…8,9 Here we apply it when referring to the human ability to modify the cognitive context as to enable decisions. 10 It remains in general accordance with the psychological concept of scripts, 1 which is activated once; the further behavior of an individual is executed according to this script.…”

“…This kind of hysteretic rule has been applied in man-machine systems, where different sets of rules have been switched on by different procedures [8,9]. Here we apply it as to refer to the human ability to modify the cognitive context as to enable decisions [10]. It remains in a general accordance with the psychological concept of scripts [1], which is activated once; further behavior of an individual is executed according to this script.…”

Formalising theories of human decision-making for agent-based modelling of social-ecological systems: practical lessons learned and ways forward

“…Selecting theories is clearly context-dependent (also see Brenner, 2006, on selecting theories of learning, and Risjord, 2018, for nursing). According to Edmonds (2012), context not only relates to the specific social-ecological situation one wants to model but also to cognitive and social processes with which the individuals are involved as well as the linguistic framing of communication. Furthermore, some theories can instead be characterised as broader meta-theories with many different aspects that must potentially be considered.…”

Heavy Context Dependence — Decisions Of Underground Soldiers

“…The problem of the fraction of soldiers who will be revealed is discussed here in the frames of the percolation theory on networks (Stauffer & Aharony 1992, Newman 2002, Hamilton & Pryadko 2014. Although these frames are clearly more wide, than the particular issue taken from history of Poland, we concentrate on this example to include the cognitive and social contexts (Edmonds 2012) to the model. In our case, these are: the Stalinist reality encoded in norms and expectations, and the relations of power.…”