Exploring the Origins of Prejudice with Agent-Based Modeling

Research into the cognitive origins of prejudice has largely focused on individual psychological processes. We introduce a novel Agent-based model that simulates both individual-level and inter-personal processes, and that allows exploring how stereotypes are shared and validated through interpersonal processes. At the individual-level, agent processes are simulated by recurrent auto-associative networks. To simulate interpersonal processes, these individual networks are combined into a community of networks so that they can exchange their individual information with each other by transmitting information on the same concepts from one network to another. Through simulations, it is shown how the model can account for a number of seminal findings from the empirical literature on illusory correlations, a key cognitive antecedent of prejudice. In addition, novel hypotheses in terms of the impact of interpersonal processes on the dissemination of illusory correlations were supported by the results of a small group experiment. We discuss the results and argue that agent-based models can provide a first step in integrating individual and interpersonal processes underlying stereotype formation and IC.