“What If?”: Counterfactual Modelling with SociaLab

The early inspiration our computer model of New Zealand society now captured in SociaLab was the notion of a “social laboratory”. Society as a social system is large scale and necessarily complex. It does not lend itself easily to methodologically rigorous analysis of a conventional kind. So, how to assess the big questions of sociology? When reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pondered this question, New Zealand was a new society pioneering a range of social and policy arrangements. An epithet for New Zealand as a “social laboratory” was coined by some observers. Visitors could come and see for themselves how new interventions might work out in a real-world setting. The contemporary comparative analysis of institutional arrangements in different societies still feeds this perspective – there is much cross-national borrowing – but what our project does is to go to the next step and consider how a computer model of an entire society might facilitate the kind of experimental thinking about social and policy arrangements that many investigators hanker for. We now consider several illustrative scenarios, each with an accompanying modelling exercise, the full results of which can be viewed using our visualisation tool at https://compassnz.shinyapps.io/SociaLabShiny/.