SIMULATIONS OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOR: WHY AND HOW?

Abstract

This paper deals with an extension of behavioral principies to the study 01 social situations, In order to understand how individual contingencies are structured in a collective situation, we propose to investigate social situations using experiments with humans, in conjunction with simulations with behavioral artificial agents, In the first part, we present results obtained with humans in a minimal social situation. In this kind of situation, participants unknowingly interact by reinforcing and punishing each other.

We observed that cooperation increased despite the fact that participants were unaware of the consequences of their behaviors, for they were not informed that they were in a social situation. The second part describes the implementation of five reinforcementlearning strategies in a computer simulation, whose performances were compared to the one observed in humans in an analogous situation, The Staddon-Zhang strategy was the best one to optimize cooperation and model human performance.