Agent-based simulations in empirical sociological research - a podcast by MCMP Team

Isabelle Drouet (Paris-Sorbonne) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (4 June, 2014) titled "Agent-based simulations in empirical sociological Research". Abstract: Agent-based models and simulations are more and more widely used in the empirical sciences. In sociology, they have been put at the core of a research project: analytical sociology, as theorized and practiced in, e.g., Hedström’s Dissecting the social (2005). Analytical sociologists conceive of ABMs as tools for causal analysis. More precisely, they see ABSs as the one method enabling the social sciences to produce genuine explanations of macro empirical phenomena by micro (or possibly meso) ones, and the purported explanations clearly are causal ones. My talk aims at clarifying in which sense exactly and under which conditions agent-based models and simulations as they are used in analytical sociology can indeed causally explain, or contribute to causally explain, social facts.

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