Forecasting Changes in Religiosity and Existential Security with an Agent-Based Model

We employ existing data sets and agent-based modeling to forecast changes in religiosity and existential security among a collective of individuals over time. Existential security reflects the extent of economic, socioeconomic and human development provided by society. Our model includes agents in social networks interacting with one another based on the education level of the agents, the religious practices of the agents, and each agent's existential security within their natural and social environments. The data used to inform the values and relationships among these variables is based on rigorous statistical analysis of the International Social Survey Programme Religion Module (ISSP) and…

ABM of Civil Violence: ODD Description

This chapter contains a description of the proposed agent-based model, using the well-known “Overview, Design Concepts and Details” protocol. The model was implemented in NetLogo and is based on the same two types of agents—citizens and law-enforcement—as in Epstein’s model, but “citizen” agents have one subtype (“activist”) used for implementing network influence effects. The salient aspects of the model description are centered on the submodels for the risk perception, the expression of hardship in terms of value-sensitive relative deprivation, endogenous legitimacy feedback and network influence effects, which provide extensions to Epstein’s model. The model includes two networks called …

Analysis of Conflict Datasets and Indicators: The Case of the “Arab Spring”

This chapter contains an analysis of selected indicators of legitimacy, human rights and inequality, as well as information about conflict events for eight African countries affected by the Arab Spring, namely Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia. The analyses described in this chapter allowed the determination of plausible estimates for input parameters such as legitimacy and welfare inequality, as well as patterns of size, duration and recurrence of conflict events in these countries. These results were used for setting the values of the input parameters, and for analyzing the plausibility of the solutions in the exploration of the agent-based model describ…

Review of Agent-Based Models of Social Conflict and Civil Violence

This chapter contains a review of the state of the art on agent-based models for simulation of large-scale social conflict and violence. It is structured in four parts. The first contains a summary of general definitions and concepts. The second contains the presentation and discussion of Epstein’s agent-based model, which is a landmark model of civil and ethnic violence due to its simplicity, soundness, and explanatory power. The third part contains a review of extensions of Epstein’s model that have been proposed by several authors. The chapter ends with some remarks on the limitations of existing ABM and on possibilities for their improvement.

Model Exploration and Computer Experiments

This chapter contains a description of a set of simulation experiments for exploration of the agent-based model proposed in the present work, devised to illustrate the model’s generative capacity and highlight the influence of the newly introduced mechanisms on the complexity of the solutions. The first experiment shows the influence of the critical “cop”-to-“active” ratio ρ c in the risk perception model on the size, duration, and recurrence of rebellion peaks. The relationship between ρ c , the occurrence of cascades and the maximum possible peak size was demonstrated analytically and then studied via computer simulations. It was shown that the value of ρ c has a strong impact on the stab…

Belief in God, Confidence in the Church and Secularization in Scandinavia

We used the three latest rounds of the religion module of International Social Survey Programme to study secularization in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, focusing on belief in God. We restricted our sample to the affiliated with the majority Protestant churches and the unaffiliated and analyzed the trends toward disaffiliation and disbelief in God. Then, we studied the association between confidence in churches, religious/secular upbringing, and demographic controls with belief in God using multinomial logistic regression models. Our treatment of belief in God as a nominal variable allowed the inclusion of both the element of doubt and different images of God in the analyses. The trends towar…

Dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity among Christians and the religiously unaffiliated: A cross-cultural analysis based on the International Social Survey Programme

We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries with a Christian heritage, based on the 1998 and 2008 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Religion survey, using both exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three factors, common to Christian and religiously unaffiliated respondents, could be extracted from our initially selected items and suggested the testing of four different three-factor models using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. For the model with the best fit and measurement invariance properties, we labeled the three resulting…

A network agent-based model of ethnocentrism and intergroup cooperation

We present a network agent-based model of ethnocentrism and intergroup cooperation in which agents from two groups (majority and minority) change their communality (feeling of group solidarity), cooperation strategy and social ties, depending on a barrier of “likeness” (affinity). Our purpose was to study the model’s capability for describing how the mechanisms of preexisting markers (or “tags”) that can work as cues for inducing in-group bias, imitation, and reaction to non-cooperating agents, lead to ethnocentrism or intergroup cooperation and influence the formation of the network of mixed ties between agents of different groups. We explored the model’s behavior via four experiments in w…

Why do the godless prosper? Modeling the cognitive and coalitional mechanisms that promote atheism.

Pitfalls in the Development of Agent-Based Models in Social Sciences: Avoiding Them and Learning from Them

The references on the principles and methodology for developing agent-based models of social phenomena usually describe general principles and illustrate the process using worked examples, but seldom focus on the pitfalls and errors that make practical model building a tortuous and difficult task. This chapter contains a discussion of the positive and negative aspects of my personal experience in a PhD work on simulation of large scale social conflict. The purpose will be to describe the process from the initial plan to the final dissertation, analyze the pitfalls and their overcoming in terms of principles of model development, and summarize the ideas that I found useful for practical deve…