An unintended consequence of low cost maritime travel may be hyperconnectedness, creating social situations where information can be readily passed before it is verified- an issue not limited to modern digitally connected societies. In traditional Coast Salish societies, the peoples of what is now Western Washington and Southwestern British Columbia, oral traditions were vertified through a process called witnessing. Witnesses would be trained to recount and verify oral history and traditional teachings at high fidelity. Here, a simple model based on dual inheritance approaches to genes and culture, is used to compare this specific form of verifying socially important information compared to modern mass communication. The model suggests that witnessing is a high fidelity form of transmitting knowledge with a low error rate, more in line with modern apprenticeships than mass communication. Social mechanisms such as witnessing provide solutions to issues faced in contemporary discourse where the validity of information and even fact checking mechanisms may be biased or counterfactual. This effort also demonstrates the utillity of using modeling approaches to highlight how specific, historically contingent institutions such as witnesses can be drawn upon to model potential solutions to contemporary issues solved in the past in traditional Coast Salish practice.

The various technologies used inside a Dutch greenhouse interact in combination with an external climate, resulting in an emergent internal climate, which contributes to the final productivity of the greenhouse. This model examines how differing technology development styles affects the overall ability of a community of growers to approach the theoretical maximum yield.

A dynamic model of social network formation on single-layer and multiplex networks with structural incentives that vary over time.

The Mobility Model is a model of a small-scale fishery with the purpose to study the movement of fishers between different sub-regions within a larger region, as they move between different regions to fish.

The purpose of the model is to study the impact of global food trade on food and nutrition security in countries around the world. It will incorporate three main aspects of trade between countries, including a country’s wealth, geographic location, and its trade relationships with other countries (past and ongoing), and can be used to study food and nutrition security across countries in various scenarios, such as climate change, sustainable intensification, waste reduction and dietary change.

This is a basic Susceptible, Infected, Recovered (SIR) model. This model explores the spread of disease in a space. In particular, it explores how changing assumptions about the number of susceptible people, starting number of infected people, as well as the disease’s infection probability, and average duration of infection. The model shows that the interactions of agents can drastically affect the results of the model.

We used it in our course on COVID-19: https://www.csats.psu.edu/science-of-covid19

This model is pertinent to our JASSS publication “Raising the Spectrum of Polarization: Generating Issue Alignment with a Weighted Balance Opinion Dynamics Model”. It shows how, based on the mechanisms of our Weighted Balance Theory (a development of Fritz Heider’s Cognitive Balance Theory), agents can self-organize in a multi-dimensional opinion space and form an emergent ideological spectrum. The degree of issue alignment and polarization realized by the model depends mainly on the agent-specific ‘equanimity parameter’ epsilon.

REHAB has been designed as an ice-breaker in courses dealing with ecosystem management and participatory modelling. It helps introducing the two main tools used by the Companion Modelling approach, namely role-playing games and agent-based models.

DIAL is a model of group dynamics and opinion dynamics. It features dialogues, in which agents put their reputation at stake. Intra-group radicalisation of opinions appears to be an emergent phenomenon.

Dynamic bipartite network model of agents and games in which agents can participate in multiple public goods games.