SISTER: a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles

SISTER: A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST SIMULATION OF TRADE AND EMERGENT ROLES Deborah Vakas Duong George Mason University, 2004 Thesis Director: John Grefenstette SISTER, a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles, captures the fundamental social process by which macro level roles emerge from micro level symbolic interaction. SISTER may be used for the computational social science objective of modeling social coordination in human societies, or for the artificial intelligence objective of coordinating coevolving agents in artificial societies. The knowledge in a SISTER society is held culturally, suspended in the mutual expectations agents have of each other based on signs (tags) that they read and display. In this study, this knowledge includes how to create complex goods. The knowledge of coordinating their creation arises endogenously. A symbol system emerges to denote these tasks. In terms of information theory, the degree of mutual information between the agent’s signs (tags) and their behavior increases over time. In SISTER societies, mutual information