Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches to Simulate Complex Social Phenomena

Social science research is concerned with the study of processes and phenomena in human societies, institutions and organizations. Social phenomena are complex due to many non-linear interactions between their elements. Social simulation represents a new paradigm for understanding social complexity with approaches that use advanced computational capabilities. The success of social simulation is largely due to its capability to test and validate hypotheses of social phenomena by the construction of virtual laboratories. This paper provides an introduction to social simulation and discusses approaches to model complex social phenomena.