ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, there has been much evidence of agent-based modeling and simulation being extensively used among different social science disciplines. This tendency has enabled agent-based social scientists to find a common language among them to facilitate the resultant interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, which in turn has defined a number of common interests shared by the social scientists. This gathering has also caused the emergence of a new discipline across the social sciences, which is known as computational social sciences (CSS).
2.1 What is it? Computational social science presents a comprehensive view of the social sciences, the study of social phenomena. However, it does not use or follow any single-disciplinary viewpoint or framework to examine these social phenomena. While the social phenomena exemplified in computational social science include voting, identity, segregation, social exclusion, discrimination, financial crises, urban dynamics, social networks, leadership, congestion, disease transmission, gossip and mass media, culture and social norms, interpersonal relations, and prosocial behavior, we do not study them in the way that they are treated in the parent disciplines to which they conventionally belong, be they economics, sociology, the political sciences, management, or psychology. Instead, we study each of these phenomena as a social process and place these social processes (emergent processes) together into a coherent framework, in which they can be communicative with each other as if there were only one social science.
