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3 Characterising Social Embeddedness
3.4 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 (both from a whole systems perspective and from the viewpoint of an individual agent)? The efficacy of being socially embedded from the point of view of the embedded agent is twofold: firstly, it will be to its advantage (in general) to include individual specific elements in its internal decision making processes and secondly, a complete model of its environment will be impossible. 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 - in other words adopt an instrumentalist approach rather than a realist approach to its models, where these are grounded in possible action*1;
as a result the models of an agent may appear somewhat arbitrary (to an external observer);
it is worth frequently sampling and interactively testing its social environment to stand instead of complete internal models of that environment (e.g. engage in gossip);
agents specialise to inhabit a particular social niche, where some subset of the total behaviour is easier to model, predict, and hence exploit;
at a higher level, there may be a development of social structures and institutions to `filter out' some of the external complexity of its social environment and regularise the internal society with rules and structures (Luhman, as summarised in [3]);
the agent's communications will tend to have their meaning grounded in their use in practice rather than as a reflection of an external social reality (since this inaccessible to the agent).
To summarise, the effect of being socially embedded might be that the agents are forced to construct their social knowledge rather than model that society explicitly.
Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach - Bruce Edmonds - 30 OCT 98
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