The Emergence of Social Order by Processes of Typifying: A Computational Model

ABSTRACT

The article argues that Rational Choice approaches are not sufficient to explain the “how” of the emergence of social order. Therefore, the concept of “typifying” according to the theory of Berger and Luckmann is understood as the most important form of establishing social orders between different social actors. A computational model is described that captures the basic features of the typifying process. Each artifical actor consists of two different neural nets, an “action net” and a “perception net”. These nets allow an actor to establish social rules of interaction with other actors, to remember the other actors after a time and to typify new actors as persons that belong to the same type as actors the first actor is already “acquainted” with. Experimental results and theoretical consequences are also given.

Keywords:

• social order
• social types
• neural nets
• theoretical sociology
• computational sociology

Notes

¹In a cooperation project with a scientist of NASA, Maarten Sierhuis, we are just trying to apply this model to the problem of robotics, i.e., to implement robots the capability to generate social order of interaction between robots and human operators (cf. Klüver et al., 2004).