The Simulation of Bullying and Conforming at a Class Based on Socion Theory

Abstract

Bullying is a serious problem, especially at elementary school and junior high school and occurs all over the world with some differences. As a countermeasure against bullying, many interventions and preventive programs were proposed (e.g., counseling, dispatch of advisers, group work, suspension order) and there are many researches about analysis of bullying and intervention and preservation strategies. However, a lot of samples and long times are required for analysis of the strategies in the real world. And we believe simulations of the bullying and the countermeasures are effective as a quick and easy analysis. In this paper, we developed a simulation model of school bullying "within-group" or “within-class” that is based on “Socion theory”. The primary feature of “Socion theory” is that each agent has an imagined personal relationship. We implemented a strategy named conforming strategy to simulate the bullying caused by conforming behaviors of students. The student agents who implement the conforming strategy watch the human relationship around them and update their own imagined relationships. Then they conform to other students to get good positions or keep their grounds on the basis of simulation results based on their own imagined relationships. The result of the experiment shows the conforming strategy increases the probability of bullying and the number of victims, and conforming behaviors increase the probability of bullying in the real world. We also show a state that a teacher underestimates or cannot perceive bullying when it occurred, and many teachers underestimate or cannot perceive bullying in the real world. Totally, we show that “Socion theory” has expressiveness to use as a foundation of bullying simulation.