PIMS Lunchbox Lecture: Katarzyna Weron

Hysteresis, a phenomenon in which the response of a system lags behind and depends on its past history, has been used to understand various psychosocial phenomena, including abrupt shifts in opinion dynamics, political polarization, and more. The aim of this talk is to demonstrate the insights that can be gained from using agent-based models (ABMs) to study hysteresis. To build an intuition about hysteresis, we start with two empirical examples that demonstrate how hysteresis manifests as collective memory. Next, we present the concept of ABMs and an example of a simple ABM to show how hysteresis can be observed in these models. Finally, based on results from ABMs, we will discuss which factors can increase social hysteresis. Among others we will show a newly obtained result that the mechanism to reduce the cognitive dissonance can significantly enhance hysteresis. We will conclude with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of ABMs.