Figure 52. Animats in a scarce environment.
Figure 53. Animats in an abundant environment.
We could see by the previous experiments that a scarce environment makes the animats
more social, while an abundant one makes them more selfish. Since the behaviour of the
animats was motivated, this indicates that the environment shapes the society, more than its
members do (if behaviours are motivated). This suggests sociology not to study only the
individuals in order to study a society, but also their environment and context.
We also made experiments with an environment similar to the one shown in Figure 52,
but with a non-homogeneous society of animats. We found that animats tend to be less social
in such situations. Especially, reactive animats ((=0.1) tended to be less social than animats
with a degree of motivation (") equal to zero, and these also tended to be less social than
animats with a high degree of motivation. Also, animats with a higher radius of perception (r )
tended to be less social than ones with a lower one. The perceptual persistence (6, !) seemed
not to play an important role in the learning of the imitation parameters. Without taking into
account sociality, animats with a higher degree of motivation (animats predisposed to be more
social) have higher probability of survival , but animats with a higher radius of perception
(animats predisposed to be less social) also have a higher probability of survival. This suggests
that societies can tend to be more or less social (after some generations) depending on
parameters that at first sight are not related with sociality. Of course, the environment also
plays a very important role in the shaping of the society.
We could see that the shaping of a society is indeed complex, because it depends on so
many elements: the behaviour of the individuals, their interactions, and their environment. A
group can be more or less social because of several parallel reasons. Artificial societies and
virtual laboratories are necessary tools in the understanding of such complex processes.
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