Modeling Prejudice and Its Effect on Societal Prosperity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-agent simulation framework to study how prejudice propagates and impacts societal prosperity, revealing that prejudice can lead to in-group favoritism and prosperity skew, despite degrading overall societal well-being.

Contribution

It develops a novel multi-agent model using the Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma to simulate prejudice dynamics and their effects on individual and societal prosperity.

Findings

Prejudice as an out-group phenomenon promotes in-group prosperity.

Higher prosperity for prejudiced agents correlates with group size and prejudice prevalence.

Prejudice presence degrades overall societal prosperity.

Abstract

Existing studies on prejudice, which is important in multi-group dynamics in societies, focus on the social-psychological knowledge behind the processes involving prejudice and its propagation. We instead create a multi-agent framework that simulates the propagation of prejudice and measures its tangible impact on the prosperity of individuals as well as of larger social structures, including groups and factions within. Groups in society help us define prejudice, and factions represent smaller tight-knit circles of individuals with similar opinions. We model social interactions using the Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma (CPD) and a type of agent called a prejudiced agent, whose cooperation is affected by a prejudice attribute, updated over time based both on the agent's own experiences and those of others in its faction. Our simulations show that modeling prejudice as an exclusively out-group phenomenon generates implicit in-group promotion, which eventually leads to higher relative prosperity of the prejudiced population. This skew in prosperity is shown to be correlated to factors such as size difference between groups and the number of prejudiced agents in a group. Although prejudiced agents achieve higher prosperity within prejudiced societies, their presence degrades the overall prosperity levels of their societies. Our proposed system model can serve as a basis for promoting a deeper understanding of origins, propagation, and ramifications of prejudice through rigorous simulative studies grounded in apt theoretical backgrounds. This can help conduct impactful research on prominent social issues such as racism, religious discrimination, and unfair immigrant treatment. This model can also serve as a foundation to study other socio-psychological phenomena in tandem with prejudice such as the distribution of wealth, social status, and ethnocentrism in a society.