Constructing and deconstructing bias: modeling privilege and mentorship in agent-based simulations

04/05/2023
by   Andria L. Smith, et al.
0

Bias exists in how we pick leaders, who we perceive as being influential, and who we interact with, not only in society, but in organizational contexts. Drawing from leadership emergence and social influence theories, we investigate potential interventions that support diverse leaders. Using agent-based simulations, we model a collective search process on a fitness landscape. Agents combine individual and social learning, and are represented as a feature vector blending relevant (e.g., individual learning characteristics) and irrelevant (e.g., race or gender) features. Agents use rational principles of learning to estimate feature weights on the basis of performance predictions, which are used to dynamically define social influence in their network. We show how biases arise based on historic privilege, but can be drastically reduced through the use of an intervention (e.g. mentorship). This work provides important insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying bias construction and deconstruction, while pointing towards real-world interventions to be tested in future empirical work.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

research
02/19/2017

Social learning in a simple task allocation game

We investigate the effects of social interactions in task al- location u...
research
04/16/2012

Patterns of Social Influence in a Network of Situated Cognitive Agents

This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effe...
research
04/08/2019

Coupling agent based simulation with dynamic networks analysis to study the emergence of mutual knowledge as a percolation phenomenon

The emergence of mutual knowledge is a major cognitive mechanism for the...
research
12/03/2018

Towards Agent-based Models of Rumours in Organizations: A Social Practice Theory Approach

Rumour is a collective emergent phenomenon with a potential for provokin...
research
02/22/2022

Incorporating social norms into a configurable agent-based model of the decision to perform commuting behaviour

Introduction: Active commuting has been recommended as a method to incre...
research
06/04/2020

How individual behaviors drive inequality in online community sizes: an agent-based simulation

Why are online community sizes so extremely unequal? Most answers to thi...
research
07/17/2023

Simulation of Stance Perturbations

In this work, we analyze the circumstances under which social influence ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset