Modeling Task-Oriented Groups: From Ontology to Theory to Method

For Archer, everyday life is shaped, in part, by the interplay of social and cultural systems [2]. A Social System is an array of positions, occupied by persons, and a distribution of status (or ranking) over that array. A Cultural System is conceived as a collection of belief-informing propositions. A Socio-Cultural System is Archer’s abstraction from everyday life and is analyzable as the interaction of a Cultural System and a Social System. Drawing on the philosophy of science, I suggest that simulation methods promise the most adequate explanation of social behavior because simulation offers the possibility of showing how and why social behaviors are generated. I then describe a social ontology, Social Systems, Cultural Systems, and Socio-Cultural Systems. The empirical research reported in Section 6 concerns a model of how individual belief and a status distribution jointly shape the outcome of a particular simulated collective decision process.1