Identifying affordances for modelling second-order emergent phenomena with the WIT framework

Abstract

We explore a means to understand second order emergent social phenomena (EP2), that is, phenomena that involve groups of agents who reason and decide, specifically, about actions – theirs or others’ – that may affect the social environment where they interact with other agents. We propose to model such phenomena as socio-cognitive technical systems that involve, on one hand, agents that are imbued with social rationality (thus socio-cognitive) and, on the other hand, a social space where they interact. For that modelling we rely on the WIT framework that defines such socio-cognitive technical systems as a trinity of aspects (the social phenomenon, the simulation model and the implementation of that model). In this paper we centre our attention on the use of affordances as a useful construct to model socio-cognitive technical systems. We use the example of reputation emergence to illustrate our proposal.