Enabling generative, emergent artificial culture

Despite the demand for culturally placed agent models, an adequate simulation approach to the relationship between groupcultural and individual-psychological qualities, including culture emergence, is just appearing. It could be argued that we are at the beginning of a domain forming process, a dawn of generative, emergent artificial culture. In this context we discuss current limitations and argue e.g. that too far reaching agent simplicity within Agent Based Modeling limits the emergence of realistic cultural-conventional level and we advocate psychologically rich models of culture forming mechanisms. We propose an approach to cultural phenomena modeling based on the interaction of habitual, affective and rational mechanisms. Next, we introduce an agent component addressing habit and custom driven behavior to explicitly model “conventional reasoning” and its relation to rational and affective decision making. Finally, we present a simple example agent implementation with dynamic and subjective use of roles, values, norms, group identities and social situations resulting in culturally modulated behavior and emotional characteristics.