Janusz Szwabiński

Motion of influential players can support cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma

We study a spatial Prisoner’s dilemma game with two types (A and B) of players located on a square lattice. Players following either cooperator or defector strategies play Prisoner’s Dilemma games with their 24 nearest neighbors. The players are allowed to adopt one of their neighbor’s strategy with a probability dependent on the payoff difference and type of the given neighbor. Players A and B have different efficiency in the transfer of their own strategies; therefore the strategy adoption probability is reduced by a multiplicative factor (w < 1) from the players of type B. We report that the motion of the influential payers (type A) can improve remarkably the maintenance of cooperation even for their low densities.

Is the Person-Situation Debate Important for Agent-Based Modeling and Vice-Versa?

Background Agent-based models (ABM) are believed to be a very powerful tool in the social sciences, sometimes even treated as a substitute for social experiments. When building an ABM we have to define the agents and the rules governing the artificial society. Given the complexity and our limited understanding of the human nature, we face the problem of assuming that either personal traits, the situation or both have impact on the social behavior of agents. However, as the long-standing person-situation debate in psychology shows, there is no consensus as to the underlying psychological mechanism and the important question that arises is whether the modeling assumptions we make will have a substantial influence on the simulated behavior of the system as a whole or not. Methodology/Principal Findings Studying two variants of the same agent-based model of opinion formation, we show that the decision to choose either personal traits or the situation as the primary factor driving social interactions is of critical importance. Using Monte Carlo simulations (for Barabasi-Albert networks) and analytic calculations (for a complete graph) we provide evidence that assuming a person-specific response to social influence at the microscopic level generally leads to a completely different and less realistic aggregate or macroscopic behavior than an assumption of a situation-specific response; a result that has been reported by social psychologists for a range of experimental setups, but has been downplayed or ignored in the opinion dynamics literature. Significance This sensitivity to modeling assumptions has far reaching consequences also beyond opinion dynamics, since agent-based models are becoming a popular tool among economists and policy makers and are often used as substitutes of real social experiments.

The Interplay Between Conformity and Anticonformity and its Polarizing Effect on Society

Simmering debates leading to polarization are observed in many domains. Although empirical findings show a strong correlation between this phenomenon and modularity of a social network, still little is known about the actual mechanisms driving communities to conflicting opinions. In this paper, we used an agent-based model to check if the polarization may be induced by a competition between two types of social response: conformity and anticonformity. The proposed model builds on the q-voter model (Castellano et al. 2009b) and uses a double-clique topology in order to capture segmentation of a community. Our results indicate that the interplay between intra-clique conformity and inter-clique anticonformity may indeed lead to a polarized state of the entire system. We have found a dynamic phase transition controlled by the fraction

Mapping the q-voter model: From a single chain to complex networks

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Density outbursts in a food web model with a closed nutrient cycle

of cross-links between cliques. In the regime of small values of

Conformity, Anticonformity and Polarization of Opinions: Insights from a Mathematical Model of Opinion Dynamics

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Detection of ε-ergodicity breaking in experimental data—A study of the dynamical functional sensibility

system is able to reach the total positive consensus. If the values of

Effects of random habitat destruction in a predator–prey model

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Food web model with detritus path

are large enough, anticonformity takes over and the system always ends up in a polarized stated. Putting it the other way around, the segmentation of the network is not a sufficient condition for the polarization to appear. A suitable level of antagonistic interactions between segments is namely required to arrive at a polarized steady state within our model.

Extinction risk and structure of a food web model.

We propose and compare six different ways of mapping the modified q-voter model to complex networks. Considering square lattices, Barabasi–Albert, Watts–Strogatz and real Twitter networks, we ask the question if always a particular choice of the group of influence of a fixed size q leads to different behavior at the macroscopic level. Using Monte Carlo simulations we show that the answer depends on the relative average path length of the network and for real-life topologies the differences between the considered mappings may be negligible.