Simulation in sociology

Simulation has a long and checkered history in areas of substantive interest to sociology, from before Forrester's model of overpopulation to up-to-the-minute approaches based on complexity theory or distributed artificial intelligence. Although in some respects it has failed to live up to its inflated promise, it offers nonetheless a very useful paradigm. Moreover, advancing simulation technology offers some advantages, particularly the modelling of macro-micro links too complex to deal with linguistically or mathematically. This article briefly reviews the history of simulation in sociology and goes on to consider in more detail specific areas such as system dynamics, cellular automata, iterated game theory, distributed artificial intelligence, neural networks, multilevel simulation, simulation of social networks and organizations, and policy-oriented tax-benefit microsimulation. It concludes with a consideration of the role of statistics in simulation and the very good potential for expanded use of simulation in sociology.