Acceptability and Complexity: Social Scientist Dilemma, and a ABSS Methodology case example

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of trade-off between including theoretically required elements against excluding irrelevant levels of complexity, one difficult dilemma that all ABSS practitioners must cope with. Social scientists finds hard to code even the most simple artificial societies, while they are expected to consider all kind of social complexity. It is argued that there exists heterogeneity between ABSS communities and it is presented a general characterisation based on the ordered set of preferences for two main variants. Therefore, with a commitment to the academic variant, some remarks are made about the acceptability of social simulation methodology among the social sciences scholars. Finally, it is presented a methodology to check the relevance of different levels of complexity, as candidates to be included into any ABSS -or as the core of a generic simulation builder-. This is made by means of some Netlogo simulation examples based on Fiske's theory about the sociality elementary forms, in a quasi-experimental way.