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2 Social Embeddedness
2.2 Possible Effects of Social Embeddedness on Behaviour
If one had a situation where the agents were highly embedded in their society, what noticeable effects might there be? The efficacy of being socially embedded from the point of view of the embedded agent comes from the fact that if the most appropriate model is one that takes in far more than just its interactions with its social environment, then that agent will not have access to that model - it can not explicitly model the society it inhabits. In general, this may mean that:
- it will be more productive for the agent to cope by constructing behaviours that will allow it to exploit the environment rather than attempting to model its environment explicitly;
- it is worth frequently sampling and interactively testing its social environment to stand in stead of complete internal models of that environment (e.g. gossip);
- agents specialise to inhabit a particular social niche, where some sub-set of the total behaviour is easier exploit;
- at a higher level, there may be a development of social structures and institutions to `filter out' some of the external complexity (Luhman, as summarised in [2]);
To summarise, the effect of being socially embedded might be that the agents are forced to develop set of heuristics that are specific to their particular society, rather than ones which are predictable from a more general top-down analysis.
Social Embeddedness and Agent Development - Bruce Edmonds - 30 OCT 98
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