Agent-based Social Psychology: from Neurocognitive Processes to Social Data

TL;DR

This paper presents an agent-based model that links cognitive diversity and moral judgment patterns with social interactions, aligning with neuroscience data and explaining differences between conservatives and liberals.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, empirically grounded agent model that reproduces social psychology findings on moral judgments and cognitive styles.

Findings

Model reproduces moral judgment patterns of conservatives and liberals.

Agent interactions reflect empirical data on conformity and learning.

Diversity in cognitive strategies emerges from social interactions.

Abstract

Moral Foundation Theory states that groups of different observers may rely on partially dissimilar sets of moral foundations, thereby reaching different moral valuations. The use of functional imaging techniques has revealed a spectrum of cognitive styles with respect to the differential handling of novel or corroborating information that is correlated to political affiliation. Here we characterize the collective behavior of an agent-based model whose inter individual interactions due to information exchange in the form of opinions are in qualitative agreement with experimental neuroscience data. The main conclusion derived connects the existence of diversity in the cognitive strategies and statistics of the sets of moral foundations and suggests that this connection arises from interactions between agents. Thus a simple interacting agent model, whose interactions are in accord with empirical data on conformity and learning processes, presents statistical signatures consistent with moral judgment patterns of conservatives and liberals as obtained by survey studies of social psychology.