Scale-free networks, 1/f dynamics, and nonlinear conflict size scaling from an agent-based simulation model of societal-scale bilateral conflict and cooperation

An agent-based model is presented that mechanistically simulates social interactions across two partially coupled lattices, each containing a mixture of individualists, networkers, and reciprocators. Numerical experiments reveal evidence for two spontaneously emergent and widely relevant complex behaviors: self-organized criticality generating fractal (1/f) dynamics, and a scale-free (power-law degree distribution) network, adding to the short list of generative mechanisms for these phenomena. The model may also suggest explanatory hypotheses for two sociological puzzles: Richardson’s scaling law for war size; and an inverse relationship between actor scale and water resource conflict, potentially relevant to this century’s prognosticated water wars. Adjusting a handful of model parameters yields a diverse set of fundamentally different behaviors, perhaps implying model applicability to a wide range of social systems and that comparatively simple social engineering steps could conceivably induce large social shifts.