workshops

DFG Workshop 2021-3

The 3rd workshop on 'Social Identity in Agent-based Models' (SIAM) took place on 8 March 2021 in Zoomland.

In this workshop we reconnected, updated each other, worked on a use case and listened to and engaged with our invited speaker Paul Smaldino about his formalization of social identity.

Updating: involved sharing SIAM related activities that were going on (e.g. funding proposals rejected/ongoing, related PhD student projects), subgroup activities (review of SIA in ABMs and writings on difference between models in ABM and psychology) and lastly our recent start of Special Interest Group on SIAM (SIAM-SIG) allowing for including anyone interested in SIA modelling.

Use-case: Bruce and Rocco prepared a great structure to discuss what is conceptually involved in modelling SIA when behaving as a group member. We started to flesh out different mechanisms and application domains that we would like to zoom into, while agreeing that we do not strife for developing one model of SIA, rather building blocks reflecting a particular part of SIA (e.g. core mechanisms). We will start a list of core mechanisms with relevant literature, and hope to dive into their formalization during our island-week in September. We will include some model explosions for Bruce.

Paul Smaldino & discussion: Paul talked about his work and shared how he looks at the instrumental function of social identity from an evolutionary perspective on matters such as cooperation and coordination. In particular the role of identity as a signal, and whether these signals are overt or covert. We discussed how design choices are made and about the importance of having interdisciplinary teams/exchange in the design in such models.

Next...

> Special issue: starting up a new core activity (Oct 2021 - Abstract & expression of interest; Feb 2022 - First paper submissions)

> Next workshop: from the13th to 17th of September we want to gather for our first face-to-face meeting taking a week off on an island. Fingers crossed that the pandemic allows us to, otherwise we have zoomland as fall-back option.

> Continue: our review activities, writings on differences between ABM and psychology models.