Modeling the Influence of Social Feedback on Altruism using Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Social feedback plays a significant role in shaping individual behavior across all types of social communities. When the social network approves or disapproves an individual’s behavior, attitudes are formed at individual and group levels. In this paper, we investigate how social feedback can influence an altruistic attitude in the context of resource sharing. We use multi-agent simulations to model static and dynamic interactions through which social feedback is obtained. In particular, we examine how the structure of the interaction network can affect the attitude dynamics and the resource distribution across the group. Our results highlight the key role of network topological features such as degree, directionality and the presence of hubs. Generally, a dominant altruistic behavior leads to a more uniform resource distribution. Surprisingly, for some topologies, such as scale-free networks, individuals with the largest resource count were consistently above-average altruistic.