How Is an Agent Like a Wolf?: Dominance and Submission in Multi-Agent Systems (original) (raw)

Status and Dominance Hierarchies

Status hierarchies are ubiquitous in the societies of human and nonhuman animals. These hierarchies constitute social norms that constrain behavior of individuals depending on their rank, dictating what is permitted or obligated in social interactions. They emerge as a result of individual differences in traits that impact access to resources, with higher-ranking individuals gaining priority of access to resources in competitive situations. Some of these traits that contribute to status acquisition and maintenance are physical in nature, such as size, age, and gender. Others pertain to social skills and cognition, such as skill at forming alliances based on reciprocal obligations, persuasion through oratory, or manipulation of beliefs through deception.

Using social power to enable agents to reason about being part of a group

2005

One of the main challenges in multi-agent systems is the coordination of autonomous agents. In order to achieve this coordination, the agents are considered to be part of what we call a group (eg, organization, institution, team, normative society, etc.). Our goal is to enable an agent to reason about the implications of being part of a group: what does it gain or lose, what are the constraints imposed on its behaviour. The theory of social power has been proposed as a paradigm to describe the agent's behaviour.

A-KinGDom Program: Agent-Based Models for the Emergence of Social Organization in Primates

2012

Social organization in primate societies is a complex and self-organized phenomenon that integrates kinship, competition and cooperation behaviors, and which can be explained using simple rules according to the adaptive behavior approach. Although it is not currently a common approach in Primatology, some incipient agent-based simulations have been used in order to study the emergence patterns of social organization in primates. Hemelrijk [1] presented an agent-based model, called DomWorld, where dominance interactions (i.e., dyadic agonist encounters between two agents) determines both the dominance hierarchy and the spatial distribution of group members observed in macaque societies. More recently, and based on the co-variation hypothesis [2], Puga-Gonzalez et al. [3] developed GrooFiWorld, an agent-based model that is an extension of DomWorld and includes agonistic and affiliative behaviors in order to reproduce the emergence of patterns of social organization observed in macaque...

Dominance, status, and social hierarchies.

Social living confers both costs and benefits to individuals. The costs are increased competition for food, shelter, mates, and the like. The benefits are increased access to these resources. The social structure that characterizes most animal societies (including humans) is status hierarchies. A status hierarchy is, essentially, a set social norms, that is, rules that constrain the behavior of individuals depending on their rank. In human societies, these may be implicit or explicitly codified as regulations or laws. In animal societies, these "social norms" are implicit yet reflected in virtually every activity, including who is allowed to sit next to, play with, share food with, groom, or mate with whom. In it's most benign form, social dominance means nothing more than the fact that some individuals are more adept at influencing and therefore leading others. In it's most malignant form, social dominance can mean despotism--the monopolization of resources by a privileged few who use their social advantages to oppress others. Investigations of social interactions in a variety of species suggests that dominance hierarchies are supported by a collection of specific cognitive functions, and that those who achieve dominance are those who are particularly adept at them. To put it more baldly, selection favors those who have social and political intelligence. This turns out to mean (a) being adept at learning the implicit rules that constrain behavior in one’s social group and monitoring compliance with them, (b) forecasting and influencing the behavior of others, and (c) forming powerful alliances based on reciprocal obligations.