Code and slides for the Master Thesis "Webs of Virtue: A computational study of how networks influence Moral Development Dynamics".
Manuscript link: https://scripties.uba.uva.nl/search?id=record_56698
Slides: Presentation slides
Moral development is an interdisciplinary field studying how humans think, behave, and feel with regard to moral standards. One important aspect of this developmental process comprises moral dynamics, the phenomena through which moral behavior and attitudes change. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the need for integrative efforts bridging different subfields and incorporating group-level influences. Despite this, quantitative understanding of the moral development trajectories, dynamics, and outcomes at different levels of the population is currently lacking.
Building upon theoretical work tackling moral development as a complex dynamical system, this thesis studies how these dynamics and outcomes unfold over time using an ABM approach. Specifically, we show how both the moral development of the population and the network topology in which agents interact yield sensitive thresholds for distinct developmental regimes and social outcomes, including mixed equilibrium configurations and collective collapses. Our results are consistent with previous research on distributed morality, moral beacons, and the role of committed minorities in social change, providing additional quantitative specification of the conditions under which these dynamics and outcomes can emerge.
Overall, this work contributes to the numerous methods currently found within moral development research. By showing how moral development trajectories and dynamics across populations can be captured using ABMs, this research bridges and consolidates existing theoretical foundations of moral development as a complex dynamical system with computational methods, providing a basis for introducing computational moral development as a distinct field of study. We anticipate this work to be a source of inspiration for all researchers interested in understanding how humans converge to shared moral views and actions quantitatively.
├── Experiment_1.ipynb # Code and plot generation (experiment 1)
├── Experiment_2.ipynb # Code and plot generation (experiment 2)
├── README.md # Basic information about the repository
├── Screenshot.png # Header image for the repository
├── Secondary_plots_manuscript.ipynb # Additional manuscript plot generation
├── Webs of Virtue (Presentation slides).pdf # Presentation slides
├── experiment_utils.py # Functions fo
├── model_optimized.py # ABM model definition
├── plotting_utils.py # Auxiliary plotting functions