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Social phenomena emerging by self-organisation in a competitive, virtual world (‘DomWorld’)

This essay explains how spatial structuring among competitive agents in an agent-based model leads to all kinds of behavioural patterns that are not represented in the behavioural rules of the agents. These phenomena resemble those observed in the real world, and thus, the model provides us with explanations and hypotheses that are more parsimonious than those of the conventional ‘top-down’, rationalistic view. This I show by means of five examples of a model called ‘DomWorld’ in which agents inhabit a virtual, homogeneous world and are equipped only with rules for two activities, namely to group and to perform competitive interactions. The first example demonstrates the origination of reciprocation of help in fights (yet the agents lack all moralistic feelings and have no motivation to help others in fights), and the second shows reduction of aggression when agents get familiarised with others (yet agents lack all internal mechanism to do so). The third reveals the phenomenon of spatial centrality of dominant agents (yet agents have no preference for any location within the group). The fourth example demonstrates the increase of dominance reversals between the sexes when grouping is cohesive (yet the agents lack all coalitionary tendency) and the fifth shows increased male ‘tolerance’ during periods of sexual attraction (in spite of the absence of any motivation to exchange). In sum, spatial positioning and dominance interactions among nearby, simple agents may lead to interesting social phenomena by self-organisation.