Abstract
Social Contexts are specific types of recognised social situation for which specific norms, habits, rules, etc. are developed over time. The unconscious and embedded nature of these make them difficult to change – becoming deeply entrenched over time. How cultures relate can be effected, in detail, on whether contexts in one culture are identified with ones in the other, carrying along with these engrained assumptions and expectations. This chapter explores the implications of social context to the problem of integrating cultures, examining each of the possible subcases in turn. It concludes by noting that how social contexts in different cultures map onto each other (or not) matters greatly in terms of both the outcomes of meeting cultures and the steps that might be taken to facilitate their integration. However the possible interactions are complex and dynamic, so the chapter ends by considering simulations that might start to explore such complexities and outlining some ways to approach this.
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Notes
- 1.
As is essentially the approach in (Barwise and Perry 1983).
- 2.
It might be that just as language might have co-evolved with the brain (Deacon 1998) that this ability to coordinate via a shared social context might have co-evolved with our cognitive abilities to deal with context.
- 3.
Other than sheer optimism.
- 4.
The fact that such a context derived from that in a particular context does not prevent it developing into a new and separate context.
- 5.
“Keep It Simple Stupid!”, the engineering principle that one should only introduce complexity after simpler approaches have failed – the opposite is “KIDS” (Edmonds and Moss 2005).
- 6.
Of course one can make the heroic assumption that the nature of human cognition does not matter when it comes to the social layer (e.g. Ye and Carley 1995; Gilbert 2006) argues that one does not always have to accurately model cognition in social simulation. However (Edmonds and Moss 2001) shows that the cognitive model can be crucial.
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Acknowledgements
The research was done under grants GR/T11760/01 and EP/H02171X/1, both from the EPSRC. Its support and that of the MMUBS is gratefully acknowledged.
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Edmonds, B. (2014). Matching and Mismatching Social Contexts. In: Dignum, V., Dignum, F. (eds) Perspectives on Culture and Agent-based Simulations. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01952-9_9
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