Modeling Prejudice and Its Effect on Societal Prosperity
Deep Inder Mohan, Arjun Verma, Shrisha Rao
TL;DR
This work develops a multi-agent framework to study prejudice and its impact on societal prosperity using a Continuous Prisoner’s Dilemma (CPD). Agents exist in groups and factions, with prejudiced agents carrying a prejudice vector across groups and dynamically adjusting both their prejudice and faction alignment based on payoffs. Key findings show that explicit out-group prejudice can produce implicit in-group promotion, while higher levels of prejudice generally increase disparities and reduce overall societal prosperity; renegade agents further depress prosperity and destabilize group dynamics. The model provides a rigorous platform for simulating racism, religious discrimination, and immigrant treatment, and can be extended to explore wealth distribution and ethnocentrism in complex social systems.
Abstract
Existing studies on prejudice, which is important in multi-group dynamics in societies, focus on the social-psychological knowledge behind the processes involving prejudice and its propagation. We instead create a multi-agent framework that simulates the propagation of prejudice and measures its tangible impact on the prosperity of individuals as well as of larger social structures, including groups and factions within. Groups in society help us define prejudice, and factions represent smaller tight-knit circles of individuals with similar opinions. We model social interactions using the Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma (CPD) and a type of agent called a prejudiced agent, whose cooperation is affected by a prejudice attribute, updated over time based both on the agent's own experiences and those of others in its faction. Our simulations show that modeling prejudice as an exclusively out-group phenomenon generates implicit in-group promotion, which eventually leads to higher relative prosperity of the prejudiced population. This skew in prosperity is shown to be correlated to factors such as size difference between groups and the number of prejudiced agents in a group. Although prejudiced agents achieve higher prosperity within prejudiced societies, their presence degrades the overall prosperity levels of their societies. Our proposed system model can serve as a basis for promoting a deeper understanding of origins, propagation, and ramifications of prejudice through rigorous simulative studies grounded in apt theoretical backgrounds. This can help conduct impactful research on prominent social issues such as racism, religious discrimination, and unfair immigrant treatment. This model can also serve as a foundation to study other socio-psychological phenomena in tandem with prejudice such as the distribution of wealth, social status, and ethnocentrism in a society.