Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
concept will disseminate throughout the group and become stronger, and an initially
quite weak concept will die out. Note that since in this situation, agreement of any
type is almost irrelevant, that implies that a concept may spread even if people do not
share the same meaning of it.
Again, a “real world” situation that could conform to these conditions is the
following. Imagine a social group in which an authority (moral, political, or other)
pushes an oversimplified concept (e.g., a slogan), and creates the conditions to make
it relevant (e.g., punishes dissent). As occurs with commands, slogans may leave little
room for alternative interpretations (i.e., p i is large), which, by equations (13) and (14)
implies that agreement ceases to be the predominant force that drives that concept's
path. In other words, if an authority presents a very simple idea that allows little room
for alternative interpretations, and succeeds in making it relevant in people's minds
(i.e., makes c 0 sufficiently large), that condition will be sufficient to strengthen the
concept and disseminate it throughout the social group, regardless of whether its
meaning is shared or not.
6
Conclusions
In the work we report here, we use our ABM to develop a complex theory about the
dynamics of shared meaning in social groups. This use of ABMs is not new, and has
been advocated by [21]. Our ABM embodies some very simple rules of interaction, in
keeping with Axelrod's KISS principle [22]. However, the ABM's dynamics are not
simple, as attested by the expanded region of combinations of p(a1) and p(a2) in
Figure 4, where bifurcations emerge.
Our theory development approach to Agent Based Modeling led us to formalize
the dynamics through increasingly refined probabilistic models. Not only is this
currently allowing us to recursively improve our ABM, but it also allowed us to
clearly link the conceptual and mathematical formulations of our theory (respectively,
sections 1 and 2, and section 5), and to gain a more general and clear understanding of
the ABM's dynamics.
It is true that our model is, at this point, purely theoretical, and that it requires data
to support it. However, we incorporated into the ABM generally accepted
psychological theory, and as our sensitivity analyses in 5.3 show, the ABM makes
intuitively correct predictions that were not built into it in an ad hoc fashion. These
two aspects, we think, are at least evidence of the ABM's face validity. Currently, we
are working on designing experiments to gather data from subjects to validate our
model. Pilot tests of one of the designed experiments suggest that the concepts of true
and illusory agreement, as developed in our theory and included in the ABM, indeed
hold. Thus, we would be very disappointed if future work shows that the validity of
our model is only illusory.
Regarding the application of the ABM and related theory about concepts, we will
use it to explain and understand psychological and sociological phenomena, such as
the ones we already discussed in section 5.3. (e.g., how can culture be defined in
relation to concepts, what happens with minorities that hold certain conceptual views,
Search WWH ::




Custom Search