This is a model of a game of Telephone (also known as Chinese Whishpers in the UK), with agents representing people that can be asked, to play. The first player selects a word from their internal vocabulary and “whispers” it to the next player, who may mishear it depending on the current noise level, who whispers that word to the next player, and so on.

When the game ends, the word chosen by the first player is compared to the word heard by the last player. If they match exactly, all players earn large prize. If the words do not match exactly, a small prize is awarded to all players for each part of the words that do match. Players change color to reflect their current prize-count. A histogram shows the distribution of colors over all the players.

The user can decide on factors like * how many players there are,
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This model accompanies a paper looking at the role and limits of values and norms for modeling realistic social agents. Based on literature we synthesize a theory on norms and a theory that combines both values and norms. In contrast to previous work, these theories are checked against data on human behavior obtained from a psychological experiment on dividing money: the ultimatum game. We found that agents that act according to a theory that combines both values and norms, produce behavior quite similar to that of humans. Furthermore, we found that this theory is more realistic than theories solely concerned with norms or theories solely concerned with values. However, to explain the amount of money people accept in this ultimatum game we will eventually need an even more realistic theory. We propose that a theory that explains when people exactly choose to use norms instead of values could provide this realism.

This agent-based model investigates group longevity in a population in a foundational way, using theory on social relations and culture. It is the first application of the GRASP meta-model for social agents, containing elements of Groups, Rituals, Affiliation, Status, and Power. It can be considered an exercise in artificial sociality: a culture-general, content-free base-line trust model from which to engage in more specific studies. Depending on cultural settings for individualism and power distance, as well as settings for xenophobia and for the increase of trust over group life, the GRASP world model generates a variety of patters. Number of groups ranges from one to many, composition from random to segregated, and pattern genesis from rapid to many hundreds of time steps. This makes GRASP world an instrument that plausibly models some basic elements of social structure in different societies.