The Grand Challenge of Helping People Agree and How We Might Go About Collectively Tackling It

The world needs agreement to address threats such as climate change. However, people seem to struggle in reaching an agreement, even when all concerned desire such goal. Social simulations have explored a number of different mechanisms relevant to such processes, including those about: opinion dynamics, negotiation, social identity, collective intelligence and voting models. However, these models tend to: (1) stick to their own silos so the connections between strands are only explored sporadically, (2) not engage sufficiently with real-world cases/data to be useful, and (3) avoid modelling transitions between different “modes” of interaction. We sketch some elements of a programme to bring these kinds of modelling together to address this grand challenge. We call upon the social simulation community to coordinate, with the ultimate goal of finding ways to facilitate such agreement processes, before it is too late.