The code and data in this repository are associated with the article titled:

Leal, Diego F. 2025. “Locating Cultural Holes Brokers in Diffusion Dynamics across Bright Symbolic Boundaries.” Sociological Methods & Research OnlineFirst https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241251322517

The NetLogo code (version 6.4.0) is designed to be a standalone piece of code although it uses the ‘nw’ and ‘matrix’ extensions that come integrated with NetLogo 6.4.0. The code was ran on a Windows 10 x 64 machine.

This model has been developed together with the publication ‘Modelling Value Change - An Exploratory Approach’

Value change and moral change have increasingly become topics of interest in the philosophical literature. Several theoretical accounts have been proposed. Such accounts are usually based on certain theoretical and conceptual assumptions and their strengths and weaknesses are often hard to determine and compare, also because they are based on limited empirical evidence.

We propose that a step forward can be made with the help of agent-based modelling (ABM). ABM can be used to investigate whether a simulation model based on a specific account of value change can reproduce relevant phenomena. To illustrate this approach, we built a model based on the pragmatist account of value change proposed in van de Poel and Kudina (2022). We show that this model can reproduce four relevant phenomena, namely 1) the inevitability and stability of values, 2) how different societies may react differently to external shocks, 3) moral revolutions, and 4) lock-in.

A Picit Jeu is an agent-based model (ABM) developed as a supporting tool for a role-playing game of the same name. The game is intended for stakeholders involved in land management and fire prevention at a municipality level. It involves four different roles: farmers, forest technicians, municipal administrators and forest private owners. The model aims to show the long-term effects of their different choices about forest and pasture management on fire hazard, letting them test different management strategies in an economically constraining context. It also allows the players to explore different climatic and economic scenarios. A Picit Jeu ABM reproduces the ecological, social and economic characteristics and dynamics of an Alpine valley in north-west Italy. The model should reproduce a primary general pattern: the less players undertake landscape management actions, by thinning and cutting forests or grazing pastures, the higher the probability that a fire will burn a large area of land.

STiMUS-HAI (Stigmergic–Mutualistic IMOI Model, Human-AI extension) is an agent-based model of teamwork in socio-technical systems where human and AI contributors collaborate through shared digital artefacts — wiki pages, code files, issue tickets, project cards, Scratch projects — represented as patches in a NetLogo world. It extends the human-only base model STiMUS v2.2, which established that two coordination mechanisms — stigmergy (indirect coordination through traces left in the environment) and mutualism (mutual benefit between contributors and the artefacts they tend) — can be decoupled: stigmergy decides where a contributor works, mutualism decides with what effort. STiMUS-HAI preserves this decoupling unchanged and adds two further theoretical questions: whether mixing AI agents into a human team distorts human coordination in ways that aggregate indicators hide, and whether AI’s cost to team outcomes depends on the type of work AI performs, not only on how much of it is present.

Two breeds of turtle — humans and ai-agents — follow identical target-selection, pheromone, and mutualism rules, so that any behavioural difference is attributable to team composition rather than a built-in advantage. The one designed asymmetry: AI agents never accumulate shared-mental-model and their motivation is fixed rather than adaptive. On top of this v3.0 baseline, v3.1 adds a task-type dimension to artefacts (“prediction” versus “judgment”, set via a judgment-share slider) that scales down AI edit-power specifically on judgment-requiring artefacts, and an ai-trust mechanic: humans build or lose trust in AI contributions based on the population-relative percentile rank of observed AI work quality (bottom-quartile work counts as an observed “error”), and that trust gates how much mutualistic benefit a human derives from continuing an AI’s work. Trust erodes quickly on a single error and recovers only after a streak of confirmed successes — an intentional asymmetry.

This is an urban dynamics ABM of abstraction of a city and residents’ activities there.

It allows you to evaluate the effects of urban policies, such as an introduction of an open facility for residents with pedestrian-friendly accommodations, promotion of bicycle use, and control of private automobile use in an urban central area, in controlling urban sprawl.

The Agent-Based Wildfire Simulation Environment (ABWiSE) translates the concept of a moving fire front as a set of mobile fire agents that respond to, and interact with, vegetation, wind, and terrain. Presently, the purpose of ABWiSE is to explore how ABM, using simple interactions between agents and a simple atmospheric feedback model, can simulate emergent fire spread patterns.

The integrated and spatially-explicit ABM, called DIReC (Demography, Industry and Residential Choice), has been developed for Aberdeen City and the surrounding Aberdeenshire (Ge, Polhill, Craig, & Liu, 2018). The model includes demographic (individual and household) models, housing infrastructure and occupancy, neighbourhood quality and evolution, employment and labour market, business relocation, industrial structure, income distribution and macroeconomic indicators. DIReC includes a detailed spatial housing model, basing preference models on house attributes and multi-dimensional neighbourhood qualities (education, crime, employment etc.).
The dynamic ABM simulates the interactions between individuals, households, the labour market, businesses and services, neighbourhoods and economic structures. It is empirically grounded using multiple data sources, such as income and gender-age distribution across industries, neighbourhood attributes, business locations, and housing transactions. It has been used to study the impact of economic shocks and structural changes, such as the crash of oil price in 2014 (the Aberdeen economy heavily relies on the gas and oil sector) and the city’s transition from resource-based to a green economy (Ge, Polhill, Craig, & Liu, 2018).

MUSA is an ABM that simulates the commuting sector in USA. A multilevel validation was implemented. Social network with a social-circle structure included. Two types of policies have been tested: market-based and preference-change.

The Sediba socio-ecolgoical rangeland model is an biomass growth model coupled with a social model of pastoralist behaviour in a commmon pool resource setting. The social subsystem is an empircal ABM.

This ABM simulates opinions on a topic (originally contested infrastructures) through the interactions between paired agents and based on the sociopsychological assumptions of social judgment theory (SJT; Sherif & Hovland, 1961).