SISTER: a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles

SISTER, a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles, captures a fundamental social process by which macro level roles emerge from micro level symbolic interaction. The knowledge in a SISTER society is held culturally, suspended in the mutual expectations agents have of each other based on signs (tags) that they read and display. In this study, this knowledge includes how to create composite goods. The knowledge of coordinating their creation arises endogenously. A symbol system emerges to denote these tasks. In terms of information theory, the degree of mutual information between the agent's signs (tags) and their behavior increases over time. The SISTER society of this study is an economic simulation, in which agents have the choice of growing all the goods they need by themselves, or concentrating their efforts in making more of fewer goods and trading them for other goods. They induce the sign of an agent to trade with, while at the same time, they induce a sign to display. The signs come to mean sets of behaviors, or roles, through this double induction. A system of roles emerges, holding the knowledge of social coordination needed to distribute tasks among the agents.