Spontaneous symmetry breaking, cognitive limits and Complexity of Societies

Abstract

The breakdown of egalitarian organization in a society is considered a major problem in many areas of study, such as anthropology and economics. This breakdown may be associated with the Dunbar number, which relates the relative size of the neocortex with the social capacity and size of primates groups,result of competitive interactions between agents. These social interactions, not restricted only to primates, occur in the form of favors, goods and information exchange that can ease the individual survival, cause the emergence of inequalities between the agents or even contribute to the emergence of acommon exchange commodity. Therefore, there is interest in modeling social systems in competitive environments, using this tool for Statistical Mechanics and Information Theory. The main objective of this project is to study and complement models of spontaneous symmetry breaking in competitive societies, due to cognitive limits and interactions in the form of favors, goodsand information exchange. Statistical analysis and numerical simulation techniques will be used for obtaining results. We also seek to add new ingredients to models already studied, emphasizing dierent types of favors, goods and exchanged information, and analyze the results to obtain comparisons withrecent economic and anthropological data.