Social World Models
Representing relationships. Exploring change.
Individual actions take place within relationships and context. We study how to represent these interactions and predict how social states may change, given a history and a set of conditions on action.
Connecting individuals and collectives
Individuals have different experiences, goals, and information. Interaction changes their actions, their relationships, and the surrounding environment. Social world models study the connections between these local processes and collective structures.
We are interested in representations that describe participants, relationships, context, and their evolution, without reducing complex social dynamics to a single measure.
Questions we study
- How can representations connect individual behavior with collective structure?
- How do subsequent states change under different action and information conditions?
- When do predictions remain reliable with new participants and rules?
Conditions, predictions, and uncertainty
The same history may lead to different subsequent states under different actions and information. Understanding these differences requires clarity about what a model observes, what it conditions on, and what remains unexplained.
Prediction errors and uncertainty are part of the research. A model’s scope must be established through evaluation in independent settings.
Evaluation and limits
Social simulation offers a controlled research environment. Results in simulation do not, by themselves, establish conclusions about real societies. We focus on testing across settings, comparing baselines, and making assumptions and limitations explicit.
Three-body civilization experiment
Observe how agents understand their environment, learn and exchange discoveries in the three-body civilization experiment.
Explore the civilization experiment