Improving Agent-Based Simulations By Endowing Agents with Social Practices Description

Why do rumours spread? How can we motivate environmental behaviour in transport and food choices?  What allows the hospital staff to effectively cooperate? To understand societal phenomena through simulation, we need computational variants of socio-cognitive theories. Social Practice Theory has provided a unique understanding of social phenomena regarding  the routinized, social and interconnected aspects of behaviour. This PhD project provides the Social Practice Agent (SoPrA) model that enables the use of Social Practice Theory (SPT) for agent-based simulations.

Rijk says: “I’ll present the work we have done on translating the literature on SPT to a computational model, discuss some of the difficulties that arise in this translation and pitch the set-up for the experiments to evaluate the computational model. As I’m fairly new to doing empirical (in contrast to simulation) experiments I’ll be very happy to hear your ideas and expertise regarding this topic.”