The Spontaneous Rise of the Herd Instinct: Agent-Based Simulation

The problem being investigated is the spontaneous rise of the herd instinct in an artificial population, where the population members have no explicit stimuli for such instinct implanted in their original behavior patterns. The simulations are focused on the creation of the herd instinct in the population that originally does not reveal the gregarious behavior. In this agent-based model, the members of the population (agents) move over a limited region, look for renewable food, reproduce, escape a threat and die. The evolution of the herd instinct is simulated. No explicit instinct is imposed on the agents. It is pointed out that both the search for food and fear, are factors that cause the rise of the herd instinct. The evolution of the amount of the instinct is slow and needs long model time intervals, running over several hundred generations of the agents. The herd instinct is inherited from parent agents during the reproduction, with certain random deviation. This makes the total amount of the instinct evolve and reach an optimal level.