Identify Emergence in Social Systems Using an Extended E-CARGO Model

How to identify an emergent property in a social system is a challenging topic. Social system modeling is an effective way to understand and explain the emergence phenomena. A reversed process of Role-Based Collaboration (RBC) is proposed for emergence studies. The Environments–Classes, Agents, Roles, Groups, and Objects (E-CARGO) model is the fundamental model of RBC. A well extended E-CARGO (EE-CARGO) model is proposed to modeling a social system with emergent properties. The system is abstracted into agent-role level, roles are modeled as a tree structure and role emergence is identified and analyzed at multiple scales. Then we derive that the masses are primary, and the individual agent is secondary to understanding the emergence forming. A case study is accomplished to verify the effectiveness of proposed approach (i.e., the reversed RBC process and EE-CARGO model). The results are revealed that the role emergence fits a cubic curve estimation by time and at a moderate scale, the role emergence happens easily. Role performances at a small scale affect super-role emergence at a large scale statistically, and vice versa. The proposed approach can be applied to investigate emergence in a variety of areas, such as social evolution.