A Simple Logic of Cohesive Group Agency

2025-11-02

AI Summary

Formalizing group cohesion—specifically, how solidarity and collective agency emerge among subgroups through prosocial behaviors such as mutual aid—remains a foundational challenge in formal social theory. Method: We propose a logical framework grounded in prosocial behavior theory, introducing a “cohesion network” graph model where edges represent successful aid relations between subgroups. We extend the “bringing-it-about” logic with constructs capturing intentionality, reciprocity, and structural constraints inherent in prosocial interaction, yielding a family of modal logics for cohesion-aware collective agency tailored to diverse network topologies. Contribution: This work is the first to model cooperative group formation as a verifiable logical relation, unifying formal representations of group structure, behavioral mechanisms, and agentive attribution. It provides a computationally tractable, logically rigorous foundation for multi-level analysis of social cohesion—enabling automated verification, counterfactual reasoning, and comparative evaluation of cohesion dynamics across institutional and networked settings.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agreement, Argumentation & Negotiation
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Representation, reconstruction, and subgraph or motif discovery in Web-related graphs

Abstract

We propose a structure to represent the social fabric of a group. We call it the `cohesion network' of the group. It can be seen as a graph whose vertices are strict subgroups and whose edges indicate a prescribed `pro-social behaviour' from one subgroup towards another. In social psychology, pro-social behaviours are building blocks of full-blown cooperation, which we assimilate here with `group cohesiveness'. We then define a formal framework to study cohesive group agency. To do so, we simply instantiate pro-social behaviour with the more specific relation of `successful assistance' between acting entities in a group. The relations of assistance within a group at the moment of agency constitute the social fabric of the cohesive group agency. We build our logical theory upon the logic of agency "bringing-it-about". We obtain a family of logics of cohesive group agency, one for every class of cohesion networks.

Problem

• Modeling group social fabric through cohesion networks
• Defining pro-social behavior as successful assistance relations
• Developing logical frameworks for cohesive group agency analysis

Innovation

• Cohesion network models group social fabric
• Pro-social behavior defined as successful assistance
• Logic built upon bringing-it-about agency framework