Abstract
Therapeutic communities (TCs) for substance abuse depend heavily on mutual aid between residents, who are expected to help each other in attaining recovery. An example of this mutual aid is that residents are expected to affirm each other for actions that are considered helpful in recovery or beneficial to the community. It is unclear how the residents maintain cooperative behavior. In this paper we construct an agent-based model in which affirmations are recorded as directional arcs in a social network. Reception of affirmations can be based on either direct reciprocity, an exchange of aid between two agents, friend of a friend dynamics, in which the exchange extends by one node, or indirect reciprocity, in which helping one agent improves the reputation of the agent who gives help and thereby attracts help from others. We then compare the model results to records of affirmations between residents kept in a TC. We find that indirect reciprocity more closely mimics the level of reciprocity and transitivity found in the actual network.
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Doogan, N., Warren, K., Hiance, D., HLinley, J. (2010). A Social Network Model of Direct Versus Indirect Reciprocity in a Corrections-Based Therapeutic Community. In: Takadama, K., Cioffi-Revilla, C., Deffuant, G. (eds) Simulating Interacting Agents and Social Phenomena. Agent-Based Social Systems, vol 7. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-99781-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-99781-8_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo
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