Abstract
We study a simple social competition mechanism and the effect of various cognitive variants on the emerging stratification structure. We depart from a basic mammal-inspired competition mechanism relying solely on physical strength and introduce a number of higher level cognitive parameters, especially individual imposition and submission factors that modulate the agents’ decision to fight . The emerging structure is generally a society spread out in status range, without any obvious polarization. Next, the concept of a “stratification game” is introduced, where some fights are spontaneously resolved if differences between agents are mutually perceived as too large. Some game variants lead to fairly egalitarian societies, while others, based on withdrawal from fights , lead to extremely unequal societies. This property also holds in realistic competition environments involving resource sharing and task competition . Overall, our study shows how certain socio-cultural conventions may overtake cognitive factors and define the emerging social stratification outcome.
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Notes
- 1.
A social range that spreads may not be politically correct, but it is found in many social contexts and is one of the phenomena we would like to reproduce with modeling.
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Tzafestas, E. (2014). Socio-Cognitive Influences on Social Stratification. In: Chen, SH., Terano, T., Yamamoto, R., Tai, CC. (eds) Advances in Computational Social Science. Agent-Based Social Systems, vol 11. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54847-8_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54847-8_15
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