Social Prejudice: Cognitive Modelling and Simulation Findings

摘要

In this paper, after discussing very shortly the relevant literature on prejudice, we propose a simulative model to contribute answering open questions in the field. The model builds upon previous work on social artifacts, especially reputation. A set of simulations is run in different conditions; effects of book keeping, of communication and of reputation/knowledge heredity are presented, under various mutation rates and noise levels. The paper concludes that, in the simulated conditions, prejudice extends the positive effects of reputation if the error is low enough. Prejudice can be seen as a mechanism for generating knowledge from simple assumptions, but becomes useless as error rates grow, possible due to anonymity and/or larger populations.