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.

Details

Title
Modeling fashion as an emergent collective behavior of bored individuals
Author
Seiler, Johannes P.-H. 1 ; Rumpel, Simon 1 

 Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Institute of Physiology, Focus Program Translational Neurosciences, University Medical Center, Mainz, Germany (GRID:grid.5802.f) (ISNI:0000 0001 1941 7111) 
Pages
20480
Publication year
2023
Publication date
2023
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2892422838
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2023. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.