Toward Understanding of the Social Hysteresis: Insights From Agent-Based Modeling

Abstract

Hysteresis has been used to understand various social phenomena, such as political polarization, the persistence of the vaccination-compliance problem, or the delayed response of employees in a firm to wage incentives. The aim of this article is to show the insights that can be gained from using agent-based models (ABMs) to study hysteresis. To build up an intuition about hysteresis, we start with an illustrative example from physics that demonstrates how hysteresis manifests as collective memory. Next, we present examples of hysteresis in psychology and social systems. We then present two simple ABMs of binary decisions—the Ising model and the q-voter model—to explain how hysteresis can be observed in ABMs. Specifically, we show that hysteresis can result from the influence of various external factors present in social systems, such as organizational polices, governmental laws, or mass media campaigns, as well as internal noise associated with random changes in agent decisions. Finally, we clarify the relationship between several closely related concepts such as order–disorder transitions or bifurcation, and we conclude the article with a discussion of the advantages of ABMs.