The Center for Models of Life

A model of information and dominance

Our model consists of a social network of agents, each having a memory. This individual memory is a simple local picture of where other agents are in the network together with a priority of relative interest in each agent. The agents communicate with other agents and modify their memory when they get new information about other agents. Based on this memory they also build new social connections to get better access to agents they find interesting.

The strong coupling between the agents' believes, the inner world, and their positions in the dynamic network structure, the outer world, has interesting consequences. The system can for example not be reset by either resetting the agents' inner or outer world. They have to be reset simultaneously, because otherwise information about the old system will be stored in the world that was not reset and enable a partial recovery of the system.

In the model, a social system on the size of a large school class is simplified into a number of agents. These agents form a network that dynamically adjusts itself to facilitate a hunt-gatherer behavior in information space, which in turn is reflected in a tribal organization of the evolving social network. This tribal organization is sensitive to information manipulation, as illustrated by influence of particularly convincing demagogues.

The model allows us to consider the impact of certain charismatic people. Thanks to their larger charisma, they can influence their fellow agents to think disproportionately more about them, or equivalently, about political objectives of which they are the main representative. Thus, our model allows for new analysis of the effects of celebrities, politicians or prophets in a social system.

Scenario 1: Consider the introduction of a single politician, or of several politicians or media persons. We find that the associated engineering of communication tends to streamline the social network into hierarchical structures around a celebrity center of fashionable persons.

Scenario 2: If two politicians garner votes with different strategies, one only by advocating for himself and the other with an antagonistic strategy to purposefully win votes from the other side, the antagonistic politician will do much better. The antagonistic strategy is so effective that it outcompetes a much stronger win-any-vote-strategy.

Scenario 3: Two competing antagonistic politicians, form a system where equal sharing of influence is unstable, in the sense that the system tends to choose one of the candidates on the cost of the other. In terms of biology or physics, the system develops bistability where a monoculture dominates for long periods of time. The state of a bistable system is historically dependent, determined on the few times in history where the two conflicting beliefs are of equal strength. It is tempting to compare persistent segregation in our model with the geographical segregation of religious beliefs in the real world.

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