This approach was based on the assumption that agents with similarity in views were more likely to communicate and to affect each other, and result in local convergence of attitudes. In his model, communication was possible only between adjacent agents that had at least one trait in common. By culture he meant the set of individual attributes that are subject to social influence. Introduction to models of social influenceĪn agent based model of the dissemination of culture between adjacent agents was proposed by Axelrod in 1997. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products associated with this research to declare. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. No additional external funding was received for this study.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have read the journal’s policy and have the following competing interests to declare: GJM is a paid employee of Quantum Fields LLC. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. ![]() The specific roles of this author are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. The model is available at the URL given in the paper.įunding: This study received support in the form of a salary for GJM from Quantum Fields LLC. ![]() This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data are within the paper and its Supporting information files. ![]() Received: NovemAccepted: OctoPublished: November 16, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Maclay, Ahmad. During the simulations, depending on the initial conditions, collective behaviors of grouping, consensus, fragmentation and polarization are observed as well as certain symmetries specific to the model, for example, the average of the attributes for all agents does not change significantly during a simulation.Ĭitation: Maclay GJ, Ahmad M (2021) An agent based force vector model of social influence that predicts strong polarization in a connected world. With a large Attribute Influence Bound all agents are connected and extreme bi- or tri-polarization results. As the Attribute Influence Bound is increased, and agents with increasingly different attributes can communicate, fewer groups remain at the end, and the remaining groups have increasingly different characteristic attributes and approximately equal sizes. For small values of the Attribute Influence Bound, numerous groups remain scattered throughout attribute space at the end of a simulation. Agents with similar attributes tend to form groups. Interaction between all agents is allowed unless the distance between the attributes representing the agents exceeds a confidence limit (the Attribute Influence Bound) set in the simulation. ![]() A positive force causes the attributes of the agents to become more similar and the corresponding vectors to become more nearly parallel. The force between the agents may be positive (attractive), zero, or negative (repulsive) depending on whether the angle between the corresponding vectors is less than, equal to, or greater than 90°. It assumes that the force between two agents is proportional to the “similarity of attributes”, which is implemented mathematically as the dot product of the vectors representing the attributes of the agents, and the force goes as the inverse square of the difference in attributes, which is expressed as the Euclidean distance in attribute space between the two vectors. The force law used is motivated by gravitational force laws and electrical force laws for dipoles. A simple mathematical force vector model is used to predict the effect of each agent on all other agents. The components of the vector are the key continuous “attributes” that determine the social behavior of the agent. The model is based on a vector representation of each agent.
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