Social Identity in Agent-Based Models—Exploring the State of the Art
Summary
A key challenge in social simulation is how to represent human behavior, specifically in its social context. The Social Identity approach (SIA) reflects a promising potential as it describes how people behave while being part of a group, how groups interact and how these interactions and ‘appropriate group behaviors’ can change over time. SIA is used in a variety of fields and increasingly implemented in agent-based models.
A systematic review and comparison of SIA formalizations and implementations is so far missing. We present our impressions from a pre-review of the current state of SIA models, such as what key SIA concepts have been formalized and how their formalization compares.
We found a diversity of application areas of models that use (parts of) SIA. We further noted differences in how parts of SIA have been formalized and used, e.g. the widespread use of the emergence of group norms and behavior, while other SIA aspects such as different strategies to positive self-esteem received little attention.
