Emergence of simple characteristics for heterogeneous complex social agents

TL;DR

This paper investigates how complex social agents can simplify their characteristics through interactions, revealing two regimes where agents become either identical or remain heterogeneous but simplified.

Contribution

It generalizes existing models to include agent heterogeneity and identifies two distinct regimes of agent simplification driven by interactions.

Findings

Agents can become simple and identical through interactions.

Agents can remain heterogeneous yet have simplified characteristics.

Two regimes of agent simplification are identified.

Abstract

Models of interacting social agents often represent agents as very simple entities having a small number of degrees of freedom, as exemplified by binary opinion models for instance. Understanding how such simple individual characteristics may emerge from potentially much more complex agents is thus a natural question. It has been proposed recently in [E. Bertin, P. Jensen, C.R. Phys. 20, 329 (2019)] that some types of interactions among agents with many internal degrees of freedom may lead to a `simplification' of agents, which are then effectively described by a small number of internal degrees of freedom. Here, we generalize the model to account for agents intrinsic heterogeneity. We find two different simplification regimes, one dominated by interactions, where agents become simple and identical as in the homogeneous model, and one where agents remain strongly heterogeneous although effectively having simple characteristics.