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Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 1
Co-developing beliefs and social
influence networks
Bruce Edmonds
Centre for Policy Modelling
Manchester Metropolitan University
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 2
Scoping Discussion
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 3
Social Embedding
• Granovetter (1985)
• Contrasts with both under- and over-socialised
models of behaviour
• That the particular patterns of social interactions
between individuals matter
• In other words, only looking at either individual
behaviour or aggregate behaviour misses crucial
aspects
• To understand the behaviour of individuals one
has to understand the complex detail and
dynamics of the interactions between them
• Agent-based simulation does this, few other
formal techniques do
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 4
Social Intelligence Hypothesis
• Kummer, H., Daston, L., Gigerenzer, G. and Silk, J. (1997)
• The crucial evolutionary advantages that human
intelligence gives are due to the social abilities it
allows
• This explains specific abilities such as: imitation,
language, social norms, lying, alliances, gossip,
politics, group identification etc.
• Social intelligence is not a result of general
intelligence being applied to social matters, but at
the core of human intelligence,
• “General” intelligence is a side-effect of social
intelligence (in particular language and the ability
to learn and remember complex beliefs)
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 5
An Evolutionary Perspective
Social intelligence implies that:
• Groups of humans can develop their own (sub)
cultures of knowledge, technologies, norms etc.
(Boyd and Richerson 1985)
• These allow the group with their culture to inhabit
a variety of ecological niches (e.g. the Kalahari,
Polynesia) (Reader 1980)
• Thus humans, as a species, are able to survive
catastrophes that effect different niches in
different ways (specialisation)
(if there is only one niche this does not work!)
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 6
Backwards-Engineering Social
Survival
If this picture, where the group collaboration, culture
and technologies allow a variety of niches to
develop has some validity, what might you need to
evolve to get it to work?
• Effective communication and coordination
between individuals = language + a shared
understanding
• New technologies/ideas being tried and then
passed around to the rest of the group
• Heterogeneity of skills and ideas around the core
set of shared beliefs
• Group coherence but some formation of new
groups occasionally
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 7
But how to understand this?
ABM is the only technique that can represent both
immergent and emergent processes within a single,
dynamic system
This requires representations where:
• Cognitive and social processes are modeled
• Immergent and emergent processes are included
• Individuals maintain their knowledge for
consistency and efficacy but also hold many
beliefs in common
• Groups are effectively maintained but with slowly
evolving knowledge and flexible membership
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 8
Rosaria Conte (1954 – 2016)
• The importance of
cognitive modelling
• That many social
phenomena have
cognitive as well as
social parts that
interact to produce
what is observed
• Downwards as well as
upwards ‘causation’
• e.g. Social Norms
Rosaria, me and my
grandson’s class teddy some
years ago
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 9
The Model
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 10
Explanatory Coherence
• Thagard (1989) etc.
• A network in which beliefs are nodes, with
different relationships (the arcs) of consonance
and dissonance between them
• Leading to a selection of a belief set with more
internal coherency (according to the dissonance
and consonance relations)
• Can be seen as an internal fitness function on the
belief set (but its very possible that individuals
have different functions)
• The idea of the presented model is to add a social
contagion and network change processes to this
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 11
Model Basics
• Fixed network of nodes and arcs
• There are, n, different beliefs {A, B, ....} circulating
• Each node, i, has a (possibly empty) set of these
“beliefs” that it holds
• There is a fixed “coherency” function from
possible sets of beliefs to [-1, 1]
• Beliefs are randomly initialised at the start
• Beliefs are copied along links or dropped by
nodes according to the change in coherency that
these result in
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 12
Coherency Function
• Gives a measure of the extent to which
different sets of beliefs are coherent
• Assumes a background of shared beliefs
• Thus maybe {A}0.5 and {B}{0.7} but {A,
B}-0.4 if beliefs A and B are inconsistent
• Different coherency functions will be applicable
to different sets of ‘foreground’ candidate
beliefs and backgrounds of shared beliefs
• The probability of gaining a new belief from
another or dropping an existing belief in this
model is dependent on whether it increases or
decreases the coherency of the belief set
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 13
Belief Change Processes
Each iteration the following occurs:
• Copying: each arc is selected; a belief at the
source randomly selected; then copied to
destination with a probability related to the change
in coherency it would cause
• Dropping: each node is selected; a random belief
is selected and then dropped with a probability
related to the change in coherency it would cause
• -11 change has probability of 1
• 1-1 change has probability of 0
• There are different ways of doing this mapping
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 14
Illustration – Belief Change
A
B
C
A
B
Copying
C
C
Dropping
A
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 15
Scaling of Impact of Coherence
• There are a variety of ways to map a change in
coherence to a probability (of the change)
0
1
1-1
0
1
1-1
difference in coherence
difference in coherence
probabilityprobability
A ‘weak’ mapping –
probably changes to
increase coherence
A ‘strong’ mapping –
almost certainly only
changes to increase
coherence
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 16
Network Change Processes
Each iteration the following occurs for each agent:
• Link Drop: with a probability: if a belief copy was
rejected by the recipient, then drop that in-link.
• New Links: with another probability, create a new
random link with a random other (with a friend of a
friend if possible, otherwise any)
In order to maintain the average link density I added
the following ‘cludge’: If there are too many links (as
set by arcs-per-node) increase the rate of link drop,
if there are not enough, reduce the rate of link drop.
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 17
Illustration – Network Change
A
B
C
A
B
Rejected Copy
Random New
Links
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 18
Summary
• Individuals maintain internal coherence – tending
to accept beliefs or drop beliefs to increase the
coherence of the whole set
• Beliefs are suggested over the social network
• The certainty/noisiness of these processes
depends on the confidence/susceptibility of the
individual (some belief ‘noise’)
• The network changes by probabilistically:
– Adding new links, but preferring friends-of-friends
– Dropping links where suggested beliefs were rejected
– Keeping at least one link each (adding one if not)
• (for runs shown kept the node/link ratio constant)
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 19
Example Runs
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 20
An Illustrative Example
• 20% of agents (stars) are such that the ‘yellow’ beliefs
are attractive and the ‘blue’ ones unattractive (due to
coherence with background beliefs), they are also
‘strong minded’ in the sense that they only change
their mind if it increases their coherence
• 80% of agents (circles) are such that the ‘blue’ beliefs
are attractive and the ‘yellow’ ones unattractive, they
are also ‘weak minded’ in the sense that they only
have a tendency to change their mind if it increases
their coherence (more probabilistic in their belief
change)
• Both change their links (or not) similarly and both are
agnostic with respect to the ‘red’ belief
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 21
The Run Variants
• 10 runs of each variant
Runs with
• no belief change and no link change
• with belief change only
• with link change only
• with both belief and link change
(there is some random chance of changing beliefs)
Output shown in terms of:
• Animations
• Average results over the 10 runs for each option
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 22
Animations
• Atomic beliefs: yellow, red, blue
• Agents shown in colours
indicating the mixture of
beliefs held (or if none, grey)
• Links are relationships such
that the beliefs of one might
be adopted by the other
• Star nodes or triangle nodes
are minorities
• Circle nodes are of the
majority
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 23
Only Changing Beliefs
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 24
Only Changing Links
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 25
Changing Both Beliefs and Links
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 26
Proportion of same kinds linked together
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
"drop & add" "none" " bel ch & drop &
add"
"bel ch"
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 27
Starting to Model Brexit
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 28
The Road to Brexit – a complex set of
collective shifts in opinion
-15
-10
-5
0
5
10
15
20
25
24/09/2011 11/04/2012 28/10/2012 16/05/2013 02/12/2013 20/06/2014 06/01/2015 25/07/2015 10/02/2016 28/08/2016
Remain-Leave(%)
Date
Opinion poll differences between Remain % and Leave %
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 29
Re-tweet network between 4 groups of
500 supporters of four UK parties
Krasodomski-Jones, A. 2016. Political Debate Online and the Echo
Chamber Effect. Demos. http://www.demos.co.uk/project/talking-to-
ourselves/
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 30
Towards a ‘Brexit’ example
3 groups: floaters, yellows and blues
1. 70% Floaters, (circles) towards either yellow or
blue (but not both) beliefs, weak scaling function
2. 10% Yellows, (stars) are for yellow and against
blue with a strong scaling function (pro-brexit)
3. 20% Blues (triangles) are for blue and against
yellow, with a medium scaling function (remain)
Groups start separate (to allow for self-
reinforcement), with random beliefs, but then both
network and beliefs co-develop
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 31
Distribution of Final Average Opinions
(1000 runs)
0
50
100
150
200
250 -1
-0.9
-0.8
-0.7
-0.6
-0.5
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
NumberofRuns
Final Average Opinion
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 32
Example run 1
Yellow connects
with floaters first,
followed by the
blues, these
polarise the
floaters, which
then separate off
into two groups,
which then slowly
convert the
floaters to their
own colours
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 33
Example run 2
both integrate
and polarise
floaters, then a
period of islands
(blue more), then
some yellow
mutate in blue
island, which
then spreads
pulls apart, then
yellow integrates
into other and
converts more -0.5
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 34
Example run 3
‘Westminster
bubble’ of blues
and yellows
separate from
floaters forms,
seperately
floaters flip each
other back and
forth but in a
random walk
which happens to
end with more
yellow -0.5
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 35
Opinion of Floaters against insularity of
Brexitiers
-1
-0.8
-0.6
-0.4
-0.2
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
Average Final Insularity of 'Brexi ers'
Average final Opinion of 'Floaters'
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 36
Average opinion and insularity of
“Brexitiers” over time in model
Time=0
Time=1000
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 37
Insularity of Remainers vs FOF tendency
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
InsularityofRemainers
FOF Pobability
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 38
Suggested Issues/Hypotheses
There are ‘competing’ processes of:
• Social influence (suggestion) vs. internal
coherence with existing set of beliefs
• Social influence vs. social linking
– e.g. an ‘extreme’ group may be good at convincing
another group when connected but groups tend to
disconnect from those with very different views to
themselves
How processes actually happen may matter a lot:
• e.g. what influences people’s change of links – do
people have a ‘whitelist’ of those they are willing
to allow to influence them?
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 39
Future work
• Beliefs need to evolve with respect to the
affordances they give in different ‘niches’
• Maybe some mechanism for precedence of
beliefs – some beliefs depend on others but not
the other way around (asymmetrical coherence)
• Maybe some beliefs about how one organises
• Context-dependency of considered belief sets
• Looking at the processes over different time
scales
• To fully endogenise language is also a set of
acquired beliefs with some basic structure
Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 40
The End
Centre for Policy Modelling: http://cfpm.org
Bruce Edmonds: http://bruce.edmonds.name
These slides are at: http://slideshare.net/BruceEdmonds
A version of the simulation is available to download from:
http://openabm.org/model/5116
AD!
Workshop on
Simulating
Ethnocentrism and
`Diversity
6/7 June 2017
Manchester
http://cfpm.org/news/182

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Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks

  • 1. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 1 Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks Bruce Edmonds Centre for Policy Modelling Manchester Metropolitan University
  • 2. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 2 Scoping Discussion
  • 3. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 3 Social Embedding • Granovetter (1985) • Contrasts with both under- and over-socialised models of behaviour • That the particular patterns of social interactions between individuals matter • In other words, only looking at either individual behaviour or aggregate behaviour misses crucial aspects • To understand the behaviour of individuals one has to understand the complex detail and dynamics of the interactions between them • Agent-based simulation does this, few other formal techniques do
  • 4. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 4 Social Intelligence Hypothesis • Kummer, H., Daston, L., Gigerenzer, G. and Silk, J. (1997) • The crucial evolutionary advantages that human intelligence gives are due to the social abilities it allows • This explains specific abilities such as: imitation, language, social norms, lying, alliances, gossip, politics, group identification etc. • Social intelligence is not a result of general intelligence being applied to social matters, but at the core of human intelligence, • “General” intelligence is a side-effect of social intelligence (in particular language and the ability to learn and remember complex beliefs)
  • 5. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 5 An Evolutionary Perspective Social intelligence implies that: • Groups of humans can develop their own (sub) cultures of knowledge, technologies, norms etc. (Boyd and Richerson 1985) • These allow the group with their culture to inhabit a variety of ecological niches (e.g. the Kalahari, Polynesia) (Reader 1980) • Thus humans, as a species, are able to survive catastrophes that effect different niches in different ways (specialisation) (if there is only one niche this does not work!)
  • 6. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 6 Backwards-Engineering Social Survival If this picture, where the group collaboration, culture and technologies allow a variety of niches to develop has some validity, what might you need to evolve to get it to work? • Effective communication and coordination between individuals = language + a shared understanding • New technologies/ideas being tried and then passed around to the rest of the group • Heterogeneity of skills and ideas around the core set of shared beliefs • Group coherence but some formation of new groups occasionally
  • 7. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 7 But how to understand this? ABM is the only technique that can represent both immergent and emergent processes within a single, dynamic system This requires representations where: • Cognitive and social processes are modeled • Immergent and emergent processes are included • Individuals maintain their knowledge for consistency and efficacy but also hold many beliefs in common • Groups are effectively maintained but with slowly evolving knowledge and flexible membership
  • 8. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 8 Rosaria Conte (1954 – 2016) • The importance of cognitive modelling • That many social phenomena have cognitive as well as social parts that interact to produce what is observed • Downwards as well as upwards ‘causation’ • e.g. Social Norms Rosaria, me and my grandson’s class teddy some years ago
  • 9. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 9 The Model
  • 10. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 10 Explanatory Coherence • Thagard (1989) etc. • A network in which beliefs are nodes, with different relationships (the arcs) of consonance and dissonance between them • Leading to a selection of a belief set with more internal coherency (according to the dissonance and consonance relations) • Can be seen as an internal fitness function on the belief set (but its very possible that individuals have different functions) • The idea of the presented model is to add a social contagion and network change processes to this
  • 11. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 11 Model Basics • Fixed network of nodes and arcs • There are, n, different beliefs {A, B, ....} circulating • Each node, i, has a (possibly empty) set of these “beliefs” that it holds • There is a fixed “coherency” function from possible sets of beliefs to [-1, 1] • Beliefs are randomly initialised at the start • Beliefs are copied along links or dropped by nodes according to the change in coherency that these result in
  • 12. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 12 Coherency Function • Gives a measure of the extent to which different sets of beliefs are coherent • Assumes a background of shared beliefs • Thus maybe {A}0.5 and {B}{0.7} but {A, B}-0.4 if beliefs A and B are inconsistent • Different coherency functions will be applicable to different sets of ‘foreground’ candidate beliefs and backgrounds of shared beliefs • The probability of gaining a new belief from another or dropping an existing belief in this model is dependent on whether it increases or decreases the coherency of the belief set
  • 13. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 13 Belief Change Processes Each iteration the following occurs: • Copying: each arc is selected; a belief at the source randomly selected; then copied to destination with a probability related to the change in coherency it would cause • Dropping: each node is selected; a random belief is selected and then dropped with a probability related to the change in coherency it would cause • -11 change has probability of 1 • 1-1 change has probability of 0 • There are different ways of doing this mapping
  • 14. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 14 Illustration – Belief Change A B C A B Copying C C Dropping A
  • 15. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 15 Scaling of Impact of Coherence • There are a variety of ways to map a change in coherence to a probability (of the change) 0 1 1-1 0 1 1-1 difference in coherence difference in coherence probabilityprobability A ‘weak’ mapping – probably changes to increase coherence A ‘strong’ mapping – almost certainly only changes to increase coherence
  • 16. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 16 Network Change Processes Each iteration the following occurs for each agent: • Link Drop: with a probability: if a belief copy was rejected by the recipient, then drop that in-link. • New Links: with another probability, create a new random link with a random other (with a friend of a friend if possible, otherwise any) In order to maintain the average link density I added the following ‘cludge’: If there are too many links (as set by arcs-per-node) increase the rate of link drop, if there are not enough, reduce the rate of link drop.
  • 17. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 17 Illustration – Network Change A B C A B Rejected Copy Random New Links
  • 18. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 18 Summary • Individuals maintain internal coherence – tending to accept beliefs or drop beliefs to increase the coherence of the whole set • Beliefs are suggested over the social network • The certainty/noisiness of these processes depends on the confidence/susceptibility of the individual (some belief ‘noise’) • The network changes by probabilistically: – Adding new links, but preferring friends-of-friends – Dropping links where suggested beliefs were rejected – Keeping at least one link each (adding one if not) • (for runs shown kept the node/link ratio constant)
  • 19. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 19 Example Runs
  • 20. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 20 An Illustrative Example • 20% of agents (stars) are such that the ‘yellow’ beliefs are attractive and the ‘blue’ ones unattractive (due to coherence with background beliefs), they are also ‘strong minded’ in the sense that they only change their mind if it increases their coherence • 80% of agents (circles) are such that the ‘blue’ beliefs are attractive and the ‘yellow’ ones unattractive, they are also ‘weak minded’ in the sense that they only have a tendency to change their mind if it increases their coherence (more probabilistic in their belief change) • Both change their links (or not) similarly and both are agnostic with respect to the ‘red’ belief
  • 21. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 21 The Run Variants • 10 runs of each variant Runs with • no belief change and no link change • with belief change only • with link change only • with both belief and link change (there is some random chance of changing beliefs) Output shown in terms of: • Animations • Average results over the 10 runs for each option
  • 22. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 22 Animations • Atomic beliefs: yellow, red, blue • Agents shown in colours indicating the mixture of beliefs held (or if none, grey) • Links are relationships such that the beliefs of one might be adopted by the other • Star nodes or triangle nodes are minorities • Circle nodes are of the majority
  • 23. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 23 Only Changing Beliefs
  • 24. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 24 Only Changing Links
  • 25. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 25 Changing Both Beliefs and Links
  • 26. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 26 Proportion of same kinds linked together 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 "drop & add" "none" " bel ch & drop & add" "bel ch"
  • 27. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 27 Starting to Model Brexit
  • 28. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 28 The Road to Brexit – a complex set of collective shifts in opinion -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 24/09/2011 11/04/2012 28/10/2012 16/05/2013 02/12/2013 20/06/2014 06/01/2015 25/07/2015 10/02/2016 28/08/2016 Remain-Leave(%) Date Opinion poll differences between Remain % and Leave %
  • 29. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 29 Re-tweet network between 4 groups of 500 supporters of four UK parties Krasodomski-Jones, A. 2016. Political Debate Online and the Echo Chamber Effect. Demos. http://www.demos.co.uk/project/talking-to- ourselves/
  • 30. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 30 Towards a ‘Brexit’ example 3 groups: floaters, yellows and blues 1. 70% Floaters, (circles) towards either yellow or blue (but not both) beliefs, weak scaling function 2. 10% Yellows, (stars) are for yellow and against blue with a strong scaling function (pro-brexit) 3. 20% Blues (triangles) are for blue and against yellow, with a medium scaling function (remain) Groups start separate (to allow for self- reinforcement), with random beliefs, but then both network and beliefs co-develop
  • 31. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 31 Distribution of Final Average Opinions (1000 runs) 0 50 100 150 200 250 -1 -0.9 -0.8 -0.7 -0.6 -0.5 -0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 NumberofRuns Final Average Opinion
  • 32. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 32 Example run 1 Yellow connects with floaters first, followed by the blues, these polarise the floaters, which then separate off into two groups, which then slowly convert the floaters to their own colours -0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
  • 33. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 33 Example run 2 both integrate and polarise floaters, then a period of islands (blue more), then some yellow mutate in blue island, which then spreads pulls apart, then yellow integrates into other and converts more -0.5 -0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
  • 34. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 34 Example run 3 ‘Westminster bubble’ of blues and yellows separate from floaters forms, seperately floaters flip each other back and forth but in a random walk which happens to end with more yellow -0.5 -0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
  • 35. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 35 Opinion of Floaters against insularity of Brexitiers -1 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 Average Final Insularity of 'Brexi ers' Average final Opinion of 'Floaters'
  • 36. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 36 Average opinion and insularity of “Brexitiers” over time in model Time=0 Time=1000
  • 37. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 37 Insularity of Remainers vs FOF tendency 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 InsularityofRemainers FOF Pobability
  • 38. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 38 Suggested Issues/Hypotheses There are ‘competing’ processes of: • Social influence (suggestion) vs. internal coherence with existing set of beliefs • Social influence vs. social linking – e.g. an ‘extreme’ group may be good at convincing another group when connected but groups tend to disconnect from those with very different views to themselves How processes actually happen may matter a lot: • e.g. what influences people’s change of links – do people have a ‘whitelist’ of those they are willing to allow to influence them?
  • 39. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 39 Future work • Beliefs need to evolve with respect to the affordances they give in different ‘niches’ • Maybe some mechanism for precedence of beliefs – some beliefs depend on others but not the other way around (asymmetrical coherence) • Maybe some beliefs about how one organises • Context-dependency of considered belief sets • Looking at the processes over different time scales • To fully endogenise language is also a set of acquired beliefs with some basic structure
  • 40. Co-developing beliefs and social influence networks, Bruce Edmonds, AISB workshop on The Power of Immergence, Bath, April 2017. slide 40 The End Centre for Policy Modelling: http://cfpm.org Bruce Edmonds: http://bruce.edmonds.name These slides are at: http://slideshare.net/BruceEdmonds A version of the simulation is available to download from: http://openabm.org/model/5116 AD! Workshop on Simulating Ethnocentrism and `Diversity 6/7 June 2017 Manchester http://cfpm.org/news/182

Editor's Notes

  • #5: Imagine a professor of physics in a wild place – does his intelligence help him to survive?
  • #6: Reader 1980, Man on Earth