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.

中文翻译：

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理解社会滞后：基于代理的建模的见解。


滞后现象已被用来理解各种社会现象，例如政治两极分化、疫苗接种合规问题的持续存在或公司员工对工资激励的延迟反应。本文的目的是展示通过使用基于代理的模型 (ABM) 研究滞后现象可以获得的见解。为了建立关于滞后现象的直觉，我们从物理学中的一个说明性例子开始，它演示了滞后现象如何表现为集体记忆。接下来，我们将介绍心理学和社会系统中滞后现象的例子。然后，我们提出两个简单的二元决策 ABM——伊辛模型和 q 投票者模型——来解释如何在 ABM 中观察到滞后现象。具体来说，我们表明，滞后现象可能是由于社会系统中存在的各种外部因素的影响造成的，例如组织政策、政府法律或大众媒体活动，以及与代理决策随机变化相关的内部噪音。最后，我们阐明了有序-无序转换或分叉等几个密切相关的概念之间的关系，并通过讨论 ABM 的优点来结束本文。