Soziale Identität in Agentenbasierten Modellen (SIAM)

• Applicant: Dr. Geeske Scholz
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Theoretical Computer Science
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432516175

Computational social sciences, including social simulation, is a fast growing paradigm allowing a variety of complex social theory to be formalised. However, the maturing social simulation community is facing the challenge of developing standards and methods for model development, including how to pick and implement behavioural theories when modelling human behaviour. While standards for the documentation of ABMs are developed and platforms for model exchange exists, the community is only starting to address the challenge of developing a set of formalized theories suitable for application to the diverse situations in which human behaviour is modelled. Choosing how to represent human behaviour in a model is critical, as subtly different assumptions can result in very different outcomes. One particular need when formalising human behaviour and decision-making is the significance of social context – representing how people might decide what to do within a specific context and social-physical situation. Part of the reason for the difficulty here is that this depends upon the complex relationship between the individual’s identity and the social situation they inhabit. The purpose of SIAM is to contribute towards formalising a widely applicable social-psychological theory incorporating social context – the social identity approach – for the use in agent-based models (ABMs). The Social Identity approach (SIA) refers to the combination of Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Self-Categorization Theory (Turner et al., 1987). SIA proposes that people derive a significant part of their concept of self from the social groups they belong to and that social identification is a fundamental basis for collective behaviour. SIA investigates how and when individuals come to feel, think and act as members of a group rather than as individuals. Our aim is to build a basic formalisation of this approach that is adaptable to different situations and ABMs. To this end, SIAM comprises both modellers and social and environmental psychologists that use and advance SIA. Together we want to build a formalized model of the essential parts of SIA – or suite of standardized SIA parts (such as identity or salience calculation) and make this publically available (together with a throughout documentation). We are convinced that a formalisation of SIA that is applicable for different cases and situations and that meets the need for more formalized actor models is achievable. Producing alternative socio-cognitive models for actors will encourage social science modellers to consider these new, social, options and so not only the default ones (e.g., the rational actor model). In summary, SIAM will produce i) a review paper of ABMs using the social identity theory (building upon a preliminary review we have already conducted); ii) a conceptual model (set) formalization of SIA; and iii) a workshop at the Social Simulation Conference 2021 discussing our results.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks