Nanda Wijermans

• Stockholm Resilience Centre

Process-relational perspectives have been proposed as new ways of conceptualising, analysing and engaging with social–ecological systems (SES) that are capable of dealing with intertwinedness and complexity. The application of PR perspectives in SES research, however, remains challenging and largely conceptual. We explore the possibilities of combi...

In this paper we extend the use of a relational approach to simulation modelling, a widely used knowledge practice in sustainability science. Among modellers, there is awareness that model results can only be interpreted in view of the assumptions that inform model construction and analysis, but less systematic questioning of those assumptions. Mor...

Process-relational perspectives (PRP) have been proposed as new ways of conceptualising, analysing and engaging with social-ecological systems (SES) that are capable of dealing with intertwinedness and complexity. The application of PRP in SES research, however, remains challenging and mostly conceptual. We explore the possibilities and limitations...

Despite the increasing use of standards for documenting and testing agent-based models (ABMs) and sharing of open access code, most ABMs are still developed from scratch. This is not only inefficient, but also leads to ad hoc and often inconsistent implementations of the same theories in computational code and delays progress in the exploration of...

Norms are a crucial part of human behavior that received a lot of attention within the social simulation community. However, some aspects—up until now—have not been addressed in existing agent architectures, such as their motivational aspects and their importance and impact in planning and action selection. In this paper we present an agent archite...

One of the core assumptions made when building agent-based simulation models is how the agents decide or reason about the action to take next. The mode of reasoning is usually the same for all agents and over time within the simulation run. However, is this adequate? There exist several frameworks that describe multi-mode reasoning, however how do...

Metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate our own cognitive processes, confers advantages to individuals and their own judgment. A more recent hypothesis, however, states that explicit metacognition may also enhance the collective judgment of groups, and may enhance human collaboration and coordination. Here, we investigate this social fun...

Wijermans, N., Scholz, G., Paolillo, R., Schröder, T., Chappin, E., Craig, T. and Templeton, A. (2022) Models in Social Psychology and Agent-Based Social simulation - an interdisciplinary conversation on similarities and differences. Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 4 Oct 2022. https://rofasss.org/2022/10/04/models-in-spabss/

Meeting the objectives of sustainable fisheries management requires attention to the complex interactions between humans, institutions and ecosystems that give rise to fishery outcomes. Traditional approaches to studying fisheries often do not fully capture, nor focus on these complex interactions between people and ecosystems. Despite advances in...

Understanding complex (social) phenomena benefits from combining different tools, perspectives, expertise, and experiences. Research designs that combine approaches are gaining in popularity. Carrying out research in interdisciplinary teams, however, is a challenging, high-investment activity. Unawareness of and reflecting on conflicting ways of se...

Collective action research of natural resource use aims to understand why and when collective overuse arises. Agent-based simulations and behavioural experiments are part of the toolkit for this quest. In most agent-based simulation models however, individual and collective decision-making are discerned, but the crucial transition between these two...

For agent-based social simulations to be a powerful tool for policy makers and other decision makers in a given context (e.g. the current COVID-19 pandemic), they need to be socially realistic and thus, appropriately represent complex social concepts, such as social rules. In this paper, we focus on norms. Norms describe ‘normal’ behavior and aim a...

Agent-based models of group behaviour often lack evidence-based psychological reasons for the behaviour. Similarly, pedestrian behaviour models focus on modelling physical movement while ignoring the psychological reasons leading to those movements (or other relevant behaviours). To improve realism, we need to be able to reflect behaviour as a cons...

The complex, context-dependent, and dynamic nature of human behavior is increasingly recognized as both an important cause of sustainability problems and potential leverage for their solution. Human beings are diverse, as are the social, ecological, and institutional settings in which they are embedded. Despite this recognition and extensive knowle...

A key challenge in social simulation is how to represent human behavior, specifically in its social context. The Social Identity approach (SIA) reflects a promising potential as it describes how people behave while being part of a group, how groups interact and how these interactions and ‘appropriate group behaviors’ can change over time. SIA is us...

Incorporating representations of human decision-making that are based on social science theories into social-ecological models is considered increasingly important – yet choosing and formalising a theory for a particular modelling context remains challenging. Here, we reflect on our experiences of selecting, formalising and documenting psychologica...

Social norms are important as societal agreements of acceptable behavior. They can be seen as flexible, but stable constraints on individual behavior. However, social norms themselves are not completely static. Norms emerge from dynamic environments and changing agent populations. They adapt and in the end also get abrogated. Although norm emergenc...

Despite improved knowledge and stricter regulations, numerous fish stocks remain overharvested. Previous research has shown that fisheries management may fail when the models and assessments used to inform management are based on unrealistic assumptions regarding fishers' decision‐making and responses to policies. Improving the understanding of fis...

The sustainable governance and management of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is challenging, largely due to their dynamic and complex nature. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a computational modeling approach that can account for the dynamism and complexity in SSF by modeling entities as individual agents with different characteristics and behavior, and s...

This book presents the state-of-the-art in social simulation as presented at the Social Simulation Conference 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden. It covers the developments in applications and methods of social simulation, addressing societal issues such as socio-ecological systems and policy making. Methodological issues discussed include large-scale empir...

The sustainable governance and management of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is challenging, largely due to their dynamic and complex nature. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a computational modeling approach that can account for the dynamism and complexity in SSF by modeling entities as individual agents with different characteristics and behavior, and s...

Social-ecological systems (SES) are complex adaptive systems. Social-ecological system phenomena, such as regime shifts, transformations, or traps, emerge from interactions among and between human and nonhuman entities within and across scales. Analyses of SES phenomena thus require approaches that can account for (1) the intertwinedness of social...

Explanations that account for complex causation, emergence, and social-ecological interdependence are necessary for building theories of social-ecological phenomena. Social-ecological systems (SES) research has accumulated rich empirical u nderstanding of SES; however, integration of this knowledge toward contextualized generalizations, or middlera...

This article presents a glossary of terms that are frequently used in research on human crowds. This topic is inherently multidisciplinary as it includes work in and across computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, psychology and social science, for example. We do not view the glossary presented here as a collection of finalised and form...

Social norms are important as societal agreements of acceptable behavior. They can be seen as flexible, but stable constraints on individual behavior. However, social norms themselves are not completely static. Norms emerge from dynamic environments and changing agent populations. They adapt and in the end also get abrogated. Although norm emergenc...

Social–ecological systems (SES) research underlines the tremendous impact of human behaviour on planet Earth. To enable a sustainable course of humanity, the integration of human cognition in SES research is crucial for better understanding the processes leading to and involved in human behaviour. However, this integration is proving a challenge, n...

Occupy, the Gezi park movement, the Maidan protests, or the recent solidarity marches for Charlie Hebdo—since the uprisings of the Arab Spring, we could observe many examples of on-site protests on big squares and streets being accompanied by waves of collective action in social media. We present the design stage of an agent-based model that will a...

Formal models are commonly used in natural resource management (NRM) to study human-environment interactions and inform policy making. In the majority of applications, human behaviour is represented by the rational actor model despite growing empirical evidence of its shortcomings in NRM contexts. While the importance of accounting for the complexi...

Cooperation amongst resource users holds the key to overcoming the social dilemma that characterizes community-based common-pool resource management. But is cooperation alone enough to achieve sustainable resource use? The short answer is no. Developing management strategies in a complex social-ecological environment also requires ecological knowle...

Of the many crowd behavior models, very few have been used in assisting crowd management practice. This lack of usage is partly due to crowd management involving a diversity of situations that require competencies in observing, sense-making, anticipating and acting. Crowd research is similarly scattered across disciplines and needs integration to a...

We argue that the capacity to live life to the benefit of self and others originates in the defining properties of life. These lead to two modes of cognition; the coping mode that is preoccupied with the satisfaction of pressing needs and the co-creation mode that aims at the realization of a world where pressing needs occur less frequently. We hav...

This paper describes the design phase of an ABM case study of Bali irrigation. The aim of the model is to explain the differences in the ability of rice paddy farmers to collectively adapt through cooperation. The model should allow exploring factors affecting self organisation within and between rice paddy farmer communities. The exercise of the A...

The use of computer simulations in crowd research is a powerful tool to describe and analyse complex social systems. This paper presents CROSS, a generic framework to model crowd simulations as a social scientific tool for understanding crowd behaviour. In CROSS, individuals are represented by social-cognitive agents that are affected by their soci...

To implement or continue water management strategies social support is needed. Social support highly depends on people's perspectives on water. However, these perspectives are not static and may change over time leading to changes in social support for strategies. Therefore, sustainable water management strategies should be robust. Robust strategie...

When talking to fellow modellers about the feedback we get on our simulation models the conversation quickly shifts to anecdotes of rejective scepticism. Many of us experience that they get only few remarks, and especially only little helpful constructive feedback on their simulation models. In this forum paper, we give an overview and reflections...

Social conflict entails a variety of social phenomena, including international conflict, civil war, genocide, organized violence, insurgencies and rebellions, terrorism, riots, etc. Given the heterogeneity of social phenomena encompassed by this notion, it is not surprising that a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches have been appli...

We discuss the field of formal, in particular computational methods to study social conflict, in order to approximate the Weberian notion of verstehen. While traditional theoretical distinctions, such as structuralist and interactionalist approaches, can be revealed in clas-sical formal methods, agent-based modeling can be couched in such terms as...

Crowds and riots in contemporary conflict are only little un-derstood. However, it is fairly well understood that the emergence of crowds and riots in conflict regions has a severe and lasting impact on the security situation. On the basis of an existing and cross-validated model of Afghan power structures we demonstrate what role opinion dynamics...

We present a new civilian crowd simulator for the Robocup Rescue Simulation that allows to represent large numbers of civilians and in which psy-chologically and socially plausible crowd behavior emerges. As a new challenge for the Rescue Simulation competition, the simulator also allows police agents to indirectly influence crowd behavior by tempo...

This paper describes our approach in modelling goal-driven and situated behaviour. Numerous social phenomena are characterised by a diversity of behaviours shown, for instance crowd behaviour in an festival, demonstation, or riot context. To be able to reproduce and anal-yse such phenomena, we state the necessity of incorporating multiple goals and...