Modeling Fashion As an Emergent Collective Behavior of Bored Individuals

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2023 Nov 22

PMID 37993553

Authors

Johannes P-H Seiler

Simon Rumpel

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Boredom is an aversive mental state that is typically evoked by monotony and drives individuals to seek novel information. Despite this effect on individual behavior, the consequences of boredom for collective behavior remain elusive. Here, we introduce an agent-based model of collective fashion behavior in which simplified agents interact randomly and repeatedly choose alternatives from a circular space of color variants. Agents are endowed with a memory of past experiences and a boredom parameter, promoting avoidance of monotony. Simulating collective color trends with this model captures aspects of real trends observed in fashion magazines. We manipulate the two parameters and observe that the boredom parameter is essential for perpetuating fashion dynamics in our model. Furthermore, highly bored agents lead future population trends, when acting coherently or being highly popular. Taken together, our study illustrates that highly bored individuals can guide collective dynamics of a population to continuously explore different variants of behavior.

Citing Articles

Boredom and curiosity: the hunger and the appetite for information.

Seiler J, Dan O Front Psychol. 2024; 15:1514348.

PMID: 39723406 PMC: 11669060. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1514348.

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