This paper explains and demonstrates emergence of organisational behaviour as a social cognitive mechanism, i.e. ones own behaviour at the cognitive level is influenced by interaction with others at the social level. Besides the importance of understanding how behaviour evolves, it is probably more crucial to control emergence or enforce desired behaviour. In our research we demonstrate this by...

This paper proposes two models for simulating belief update in social networks in cases where certain beliefs might be considered to be competing. The proposed models represent different attitudes of people towards the perceived conflict between beliefs. Computer simulations show that the first model usually divides the community into several distinct groups with one of the beliefs being reject...

This paper analyzes two proposed models for simulating opinion dynamics in social networks where beliefs might be considered to be competing. In both models agents have a degree of tolerance, which represents the extent to which the agent takes into account the differing beliefs of other agents, and a degree of conflict, which represents the extent to which two beliefs are considered to be comp...

This proposal is to develop a framework for agent based social simulation on the Grid. The proposal is oriented to social systems which model size is important, thus we require means to scale up models and not limit simulation size. Furthermore, agents that comprise these models should be able to make use of distributed computational resources. Therefore, aiming to facilitate the scalability of...

MoSeS (Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science) is a research node of the National Centre for e-Social Science. MoSeS uses e-Science techniques to execute an events-driven model that simulates discrete demographic processes; this allows us to project the UK population 25 years into the future. This paper describes the architecture, simulation methodology and latest results obtained by MoSeS.

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the past few years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accou...

In Agent-based Models, the latest addition to his impressive body of scientific work, Nigel Gilbert's purpose is again pedagogical; here, to introduce graduate and post-graduate social science students as well as uninitiated social scientists to multi-agent systems. As may be deduced from the first lines of the preface, the restricted focus here restricted compared to the remarkable Simulation ...

Rumour diffusion has been widely studied in the literature. However, most prior work assumes that the rumour initiators are humans. This assumption does not hold in cyber space where some of the accounts are hacked. These hacked accounts aggressively disseminate rumours by continuously sending a large amount of messages. Our results show that when rumours are initiated by hacked accounts, the r...

A broad cross-section of the social sciences is increasingly turning to biology and evolutionary theory to help explain human behavior. Political science is a notable exception to this trend, even though there are sound conceptual reasons for expecting biological processes to play an important role in explaining political behavior. While agreeing with the conceptual arguments, the authors belie...

Simulation based research, especially for social systems have grown in size and matured in the last two decades. But in spite of high potential impact, adoption and applicability within businesses is relatively low, especially so in the consumer goods industry. This paper indicates some key focus areas in research which, if pursued consistently, are most likely to have the highest impact. These...