Emergence of Simple Characteristics for Heterogeneous Complex Social Agents

• Main Author: Eric Bertin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
• Series: Symmetry
• Subjects: sociophysics; statistical physics; heterogeneity; phase transition; glass transition
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/12/8/1281

Models of interacting social agents often represent agents as very simple entities with a small number of degrees of freedom, as exemplified by binary opinion models for instance. Understanding how such simple individual characteristics may emerge from potentially much more complex agents is thus a natural question. It has been proposed recently in [E. Bertin, P. Jensen, C. R. Phys. <b>20</b>, 329 (2019)] that some types of interactions among agents with many internal degrees of freedom may lead to a `simplification’ of agents, which are then effectively described by a small number of internal degrees of freedom. Here, we generalize the model to account for agent intrinsic heterogeneity. We find two different simplification regimes, one dominated by interactions, where agents become simple and identical as in the homogeneous model, and one where agents remain strongly heterogeneous although effectively with simple characteristics.