Do gossips enhance group hierarchies?

Overview & Synopsis

We consider a simple model of agents that have an opinion about themselves, about the group they belong to and about the other agents and their group. During random pair interactions, the agents modify their opinions about themselves, about their group, about the other agent and about her group and possibly about some other agents and their group (if there are gossips in the model). We assume that in the discussions, the agents do not tell directly their opinions about the agents and themselves, but a weighted average of this opinion and their group opinion. This aims at modelling socially expected behaviours that take into account the group status of an agent when talking about her (even when the agent talks about herself). Starting from neutral opinions about groups and agents, we observe the emergence of group hierarchies when gossips are activated in the model while there is none otherwise.