Patterns of Social Influence in a Network of Situated Cognitive Agents

TL;DR

This study uses computational experiments to explore how social influence affects individual and collective behavior of cognitive agents in a product market, revealing increased productivity but reduced individual utility.

Contribution

It introduces an agent-based model to analyze the impact of social influence on cognitive agents' behavior in a market environment, highlighting productivity-utility trade-offs.

Findings

Social agents consume more products and utility collectively.

Individual utility per unit decreases with social influence.

Agent-based model is effective for studying collective cognitive behavior.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effects of social influence on individual and systemic behavior of situated cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment. Paired experiments were performed with identical initial conditions to compare social agents with non- social agents. Experiment results show that social agents are more productive in consuming available products, both in terms of aggregate unit consumption and aggregate utility. But this comes at a cost of individual average utility per unit consumed. In effect, social interaction achieved higher productivity by 'lowering the standards' of individual consumers. While still at an early stage of development, such an agent-based model laboratory is shown to be an effective research tool to investigate rich collective behavior in the context of demanding cognitive tasks.