Emergence of Social Dynamics among Affectively Motivated Agents

Social simulation research on the emergence of social structure among individual organisms is generally studied by computational models in which agents make rational decisions or no decisions at all. In this work, we develop an agent-based model which simulates emotion as the motivation for decision-making of individual affective agents within a simulated social environment. We formalize an alternative theory of agency by Di Paolo, which states that agents are fully coupled to the environment via perception and action through core affect, a dimensional model of emotion. We propose that emotion lies at the core of the affective self-regulation of the coupling between the agent and the environment. As a first experiment, we use our model to generate the emergence of zones of cooperation in the Demographic Prisoner's Dilemma (DPD) as proposed by Epstein. We hypothesize that our model can provide a cognitively plausible explanation for the dynamics of cooperation within the DPD. In the second experiment, we use our model to generate a sociological phenomenon, called the histeroidal cycle. The theory backing this phenomenon states that, over the course of generations, the influence of a sociopathic minority on the well-being of the cooperative majority of the society increases and decreases periodically. Our model assumptions are sufficient to generate these dynamics and can be applied to gain new insights into the affect-based behavioral foundations of the evolution of social structure in general.