6.2.4. Collective misbelief
“All ideas are valid in the context they were created”
In these experiments we will study collective misbelief30. An example of collective
misbelief follows: Sven believes that Thorfin is going for wine, so he is going along with him;
but Thorfin believes that Sven is going for wine, so he is going along with him. In fact, no one
has wine or money to buy wine, but they have misbeliefs that are reinforced mutually. So, we
can say that collective misbelief is given when a group of individuals believes that the rest of the
group is knowing what they are doing, and vice versa, when actually no one knows what to do.
Quoting Immanuel Kant, “one milks the male and the other one holds the bucket”.
In order to simulate this, we thought of a configuration as the one shown in Figure 54:
we have four hungry predator animats in a closed space with only one exit, each one perceiving
another, and the last perceiving the first. Using clock coordinates, the first animat is at nine
o’clock, the second at six o’clock, the third at three o’clock, and the fourth at twelve o’clock.
The first predator is perceiving a prey on the entrance of the corral where the predators are
almost confined to. We used values of rp equal to 30.0, ! equal to 0.5, and * equal to 0.0 to
avoid induction of behaviour (otherwise, the first animat would tell the fourth where the prey
was, and the fourth the third, and so on).
Figure 54. Four hungry predators in a corral, each one
perceiving the next, and the first perceiving a prey.
When the simulation starts, the first predator perceives the prey, and he begins to
approach him. Since the second animat is also hungry, and perceives the first one approaching
a prey, he imitates his behaviour and approaches him. The same occurs with the third
perceiving the second, and the fourth the third. But, soon after the prey leaves the sight of the
first animat, he forgets where the prey was, because of his value of !. So, since he is perceiving
30Doran (1998) presents an extensive discussion on collective misbelief in artificial societies.
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