Figure 3.

Collective belief dynamics of multi-agent active inference simulations under different generative model parameterisations. Above each panel are listed the parameter values of $\gamma$, ${\omega }^{\mathbf{Soc}}$, and $\eta$ used in the simulation. Other parameters were fixed with $T=50$ timesteps, $N=30$, network connectivity $p=0.2$, and inverse environmental volatility ${\omega }^{\mathbf{Idea}}=9.0$. At the beginning of each simulation, every agent’s beliefs about Idea 1 were sampled from a uniform distribution over the interval $Q(s^{\mathbf{Idea}}=\mathbf{Idea}\mathbf{1})\in (0.4,0.6)$. Each panel displays the evolving beliefs of all agents about Idea 1 (the Bernoulli parameter of each agent’s respective posterior over $s^{\mathbf{Idea}}$), with proximity of the belief to $1.0$ indicated by colouring along the green-to-blue spectrum (blue beliefs indicate $Q(s^{\mathbf{Idea}}=\mathbf{Idea}\mathbf{1})>0.5$). Panels (A,D) demonstrate polarisation, where two subsets of agents end up believing in two different levels of the Idea hidden state with high certainty. Panels (B,C) on the other hand show examples of consensus, where the whole network converges to the same opinion by the end of the simulation.