Prawdziwi ludzie jako agenci w symulacjach społecznych: przegląd prototypów i wyłaniających się hipotez
[Real people as agents in social simulations: a review of prototypes and emerging hypotheses]

Piotr Magnuszewski (Centre for Systems Solutions, Wrocław)


Living in a world of unprecedented global challenges, each and every one of us has stakes in the 
future. Behind the most recent crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ongoing wars, other, 
potentially even more perilous emergencies threaten our wellbeing such as climate change, biodiversity 
collapse, or growing economic inequalities. But despite anticipating them, we, as stakeholders of the 
Earth, are unable to craft a consistent, united response.

These challenges are intricately complex, to the extent that even our best attempts to tackle them 
often fail or lead to unexpected side effects. Consequently, in spite of the modeling progress in 
natural and social sciences, we admit an inherent uncertainty in our future scenarios, especially when 
applied with a long-term perspective in mind. To make matters worse, everyone's judgment is warped by 
their different interpretations of reality, personal values, and worldviews - a widespread ambiguity 
over the right diagnoses and solutions. As a result, we not only fail to see both the big picture and 
the interconnections between its elements but also are unable to initiate the necessary collaboration 
between different fractions of a polarized society. 

High stakes and deep uncertainties about the future make the case for complementing "hard" 
quantitative approaches (e.g. various statistical methods or agent-based modeling) with "soft" 
qualitative methods (visioning, scenarios, storytelling, or even art). These qualitative processes are 
used to explore divergent future trajectories at different scales, across multiple sectors to assist 
in the preparation of robust development plans, visions, and strategies. Analytical modes focusing on 
abstract representations and/or data-focused computational approaches can be complemented with more 
visual (seeing) and interactive (doing) modes, engaging a wide group of stakeholders.

Social Simulation is an approach linking qualitative and quantitative methods to support the 
exploration of future pathways while fostering social learning. The proposed process is "social" 
because it requires collaboration between real people representing different groups and organizations, 
coming from different backgrounds and holding different worldviews. We call it a "simulation" because 
it emulates carefully selected (and represented using simple quantitative models) real-world 
structures and processes. Social Simulation allows broad groups of experts and practitioners to unfold 
one of the many possible future pathways and then step back, to reflect on their own assumptions and 
actions, which often result in broadening their perspectives.

Several examples of social simulations' design and applications in the area of sustainability will be 
presented, demonstrating the flexibility of the approach by showing how it can be adapted to different 
objectives, group sizes, and levels of analysis. A preliminary proposition of a more rigorous 
elaboration of the social simulation approach as a research method will be presented. 


(*) Joint work with Łukasz Jarząbek, Michalina Kułakowkska, Aleksandra Solińska-Nowak, Bartosz 
Naprawa, Anna Koch, Michał Pająk, Paolo Campo, and other members of the Centre for Systems Solutions.