An agent-based model of the formation and evolution of common ground

2026-07-30

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of rigorous micro-to-macro modeling in understanding how shared group-level common ground emerges from individual cognition and social interaction. The authors propose an agent-based model that simulates repeated grounding interactions between senders and receivers on complex networks, incorporating asymmetric roles, response uncertainty, and continuous interpretation mechanisms to capture realistic scenarios such as message acceptance or rejection, transmission loss, and ambiguous comprehension. Through Monte Carlo simulations, the model reveals that varying interaction conditions and information availability can lead to diverse emergent structures—including global consensus, fragmented multi-cluster states, or complete absence of consensus—thereby providing a theoretical foundation for understanding the mechanisms underlying collective coordination.

Abstract

The existence of a communal common ground is vital for collective action and coordination in a population, but the micro-level cognitive and social processes that lead to the formation and evolution of common ground at the macro-level are undertheorised and have not been rigorously explored. In this work, we adopt a formal approach and develop an agent-based model that describes repeated grounding attempts between agents interacting on a network, with an explicit distinction between a sender agent and a receiver agent during an interaction involving sharing information. Several key novel features enable us to capture a range of different interaction contexts: we allow for the interaction to result in either acceptance or rejection, the receiver's response may be lost to the sender, and the sender can interpret this lack of response as either acceptance or rejection (or even something in between). A campaign of Monte Carlo simulations reveals how different interaction contexts, as well as the available information for sharing, result in different emergent phenomena, such as a global communal common ground, fragmentation into multiple clusters of differing common ground, and even the total loss of any shared common ground. This work highlights the potential for using mathematical models to study micro-macro links in cultural dynamics, including identifying ways to facilitate interactions to foster the emergence of a global communal common ground.

Problem

• common ground
• agent-based model
• collective action
• cultural dynamics
• micro-macro link

Innovation

• agent-based modeling
• common ground
• micro-macro link
• cultural dynamics
• Monte Carlo simulation