A Dialogical Logic-based Simulation Architecture for Social Agents and the Emergence of Extremist Behaviour

Abstract. In the flourishing research area of agent-based social sim-ulation, the focus is on the emergence of social phenomena from the interactions of individual autonomous agents. There is, however, a rela-tive underexposure of the cognitive properties of agents, as the existing agent architectures often focus on behaviour alone. Cognition becomes particularly salient when the subject under investigation concerns social phenomena where agents need to reason about other agents ’ beliefs. We see this as a requirement for any communication with some degree of intelligence. In this paper we use concepts and methods from dynamic epistemic logic to build agents capable of reasoning about other agents’ beliefs and their own. In dynamic epistemic logic, agents are assumed to be perfect rational reasoners. We break with this unrealistic assumption in order to bridge the gap between the sociological and the logical ap-proach. Our model is based on a minimal set of assumptions representing cognitive processes relevant to modelling the macro-phenomena of group formation and radicalisation. 1