FROM MICRO BEHAVIORS TO MACRO EFFECTS - AGENT BASED MODELING OF ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS SPREAD AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE CONSUMPTION OF A LIMITED RESOURCE

This research starts from an overview of the many aspects that link ICT - and related activities - to the environment, with particular reference to software development. We introduce an interdisciplinary framework to delineate boundaries, overlaps, and relations between different areas of science that underlie the interactions outlined. We then identified some conceptual tools that allow us to introduce the key concept of the research, namely environmental awareness and the mechanisms of its spread. The concepts that are derived from this interdisciplinary and intersectorial excursus are mainly those of social influence in the spread of ideas, the formation of social norms, agent based modeling, the emergence of collective phenomena from individual behavior, and of the socio-technical systems. The methodological approach followed here is based on the observation that while most people generally agree that environmental sustainability is a general objective worth achieving, at the specific level the consumption of finite resources is not sustainable. This leads to the conclusion that any behavioral change towards sustainability must be based on environmental awareness at the individual, collective, and institutional level. The research objectives consisted in identifying the underlying mechanisms of human behaviours in limited resource consumption, in order to define a conceptual model able not only to describe them but also to analyze if and when scenarios of sustainable behavior may be emerging. The operating result is an agent-based model (ABM) that simulates how environmental awareness spreads in a system whose unsustainable consumption should be reduced and how both social influence and empowering technology play a role in determining social norms of sustainability. The examples given relate mainly to the use of energy, but the conceptual model is not limited to that resource. SAM4SN (Spread of Awareness Model for Social Norm) is an ABM that may allow other researchers to conduct experiments in socio-technical innovation for environmental goals and to understand the responsibilities and consequences of human behavior on environmental sustainability in various institutions, including informal ones. One of the main findings of the research is the ability of the model to provide some monitoring indicators able to foresee if the system will achieve the goal of reducing the limited resource, i.e. if it will reach sustainability. Such indicators, with the SAM4SN model, can be usefull tools in energy policy making.