ABSS Methodology for testing complexity levels: Case of elementary forms of sociality

In this paper, we studied the problem of tradeoff between including theoretically required elements against excluding irrelevant levels of complexity, one difficult dilemma that ABSS practitioners must cope with because today social scientists still finds hard to code even the most simple artificial societies while they need to consider all kind of social complexity. We argued that there exists heterogeneity between ABSS communities, and we characterise in general terms the ordered set of preferences of the two main variants. Therefore, with a commitment to the academic variant, we make some remarks about the acceptability of a social simulation among the social sciences scholars. Finally, we present a methodology to check the relevance of different levels of complexity, as candidates to be included into any ABSS, or as the core of a generic simulation builder. This is made by means of an example that considers Fiske's theory about elementary forms of sociality in a quasiexperimental way.