Is the Person-Situation Debate Important for Agent-Based Modeling and Vice-Versa?

BACKGROUND: Agent-based models (ABM) are believed to be a very powerful tool in the social sciences, sometimes even treated as a substitute for social experiments. When building an ABM we have to define the agents and the rules governing the artificial society. Given the complexity and our limited understanding of the human nature, we face the problem of assuming that either personal traits, the situation or both have impact on the social behavior of agents. However, as the long-standing person-situation debate in psychology shows, there is no consensus as to the underlying psychological mechanism and the important question that arises is whether the modeling assumptions we make will have a substantial influence on the simulated behavior of the system as a whole or not. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Studying two variants of the same agent-based model of opinion formation, we show that the decision to choose either personal traits or the situation as the primary factor driving social interactions is of critical importance. Using Monte Carlo simulations (for Barabasi-Albert networks) and analytic calculations (for a complete graph) we provide evidence that assuming a person-specific response to social influence at the microscopic level generally leads to a completely different and less realistic aggregate or macroscopic behavior than an assumption of a situation-specific response; a result that has been reported by social psychologists for a range of experimental setups, but has been downplayed or ignored in the opinion dynamics literature. SIGNIFICANCE: This sensitivity to modeling assumptions has far reaching consequences also beyond opinion dynamics, since agent-based models are becoming a popular tool among economists and policy makers and are often used as substitutes of real social experiments.