Meeting in Paolo’s office, today at 14:30. List of major topics and findings follows:
- We discussed the model overview and its 4 stages/levels: the environment, the modifiers („Personality Traits“, „Internal Variables“), the Variables („influenced by perception“), and the behavior.
- I could not provide convincing arguments as to the nature of the individual variables being [0,1] intervals, other than it representing a first working assumption. This should be clarified in future versions.
- The role of the modifiers (obviously my term; I’ll just stick to it until I can decide on something more fitting) was discussed, especially regarding their natures definitions as compared to other terms and constructs commonly used to describe personalities (e.g. those of „the Big five“). It might be worthwhile to get a better overview here, but all in all I got the impression that I was on the right track here, especially after discussing the conceptual closeness of my „insecurity“ and „leadership“ terms with the notions „status“ and „power“. Still, from the theoretical background point of view it would be nice to be able to provide some alternatives here.
- Another important topic was my (intuitive? At least somewhat unreflected) inclusion of a decay mechanic within the handling of an agent’s arousal level. Paolo was right here in assuming that I merely included it in the first place because, well, I felt that merely increasing an important variable like that over time would not represent a very natural process. I will have to see if I can somehow back up either approach with some literature, but I must confess that I am now intrigued to go with an unrestrained arousal level first; I quite liked the idea of “Gefangensein in einem Zustand”. Otherwise, a more concrete theory of how disengagement actually works could be helpful. Tony Higgins was named as a possible source.
- Also mentioned was the problem of consistency (and therefore the possible occurance of dithering), which is not currently explicitly addressed in the model (that is, agents show little consistency in their states other than that introduced by the fact of small step changes). I’ve taken the hint that I should probably think about the implementation of some more explicit and endogenous mechanism to handle this, like some kind of “momentum” of change. Right now, however, I feel like this has a relatively low priority, since said mechanism could probably be built on the current handling, which (while maybe not being perfect with regard to artifacts) still provides some basic functionality.
- Also discussed were more technical aspects of the programming environment, such as the possibility to include external functions (Java,…), and the importance of wrappers to analyze over multiple runs (something that I will definitely look into once the analysis moves into main focus).
- Finally, the last (but certainly not least) major topic was literature, where I agreed to do further background research (“persons/institutions/journals”) on the existing bibliography. In addition, Paolo showed me two new (and apparently promising) sources for papers, namely the ACM/WSC ’07 (several landmark papers and tutorials) and BRIMS/SISO ’07 (emphasis on list of recommended readings).
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