Towards a Social Simulation Interaction Tool for Policy Makers—A New Research Agenda to Enable Usage of More Complex Social Simulations

Summary

Social simulations can be a powerful tool for policy makers and other decision makers to support them in their decision making process. To be a powerful tool, it is not only important that the agents in the simulation exhibit realistic–human like—behavior, but also that the simulation is empowering the policy maker to use it in a—for them—meaningful way. To tackle this problem, we require interaction tools and visualization capabilities necessary to support non-expert users (such as policy makers). To understand what these non-expert users need, we performed a focus group study to gain insights into the potential requirements of such an interaction tool with respect to norms. This resulted in a list of requirements to support non-expert users in the analysis of norm conflicts after they happened during the simulation. But more importantly we are calling for a new research agenda in the field of social simulation to support non-expert users with the abstract analysis of norms before conflicts happen in the simulation run, as the results showed that the participants were not able to do that kind of analysis.

Information

Theme affiliation: Interacting complexities
Link to centre authors: Wijermans, Nanda
Publication info: Christian Kammler, Frank Dignum, Nanda Wijermans. 2024. Towards a Social Simulation Interaction Tool for Policy Makers—A New Research Agenda to Enable Usage of More Complex Social Simulations. Springer Link. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57785-7_14

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