Risk, Individual Differences, and Environment: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Sexual Risk-Taking

Authored by Emily Nagoski, Erick Janssen, David Lohrmann, Eric Nichols

Date Published: 2012-08

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-011-9867-5

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Risky sexual behaviors, including the decision to have unprotected sex, result from interactions between individuals and their environment. The current study explored the use of Agent-Based Modeling (ABM)-a methodological approach in which computer-generated artificial societies simulate human sexual networks-to assess the influence of heterogeneity of sexual motivation on the risk of contracting HIV. The models successfully simulated some characteristics of human sexual systems, such as the relationship between individual differences in sexual motivation (sexual excitation and inhibition) and sexual risk, but failed to reproduce the scale-free distribution of number of partners observed in the real world. ABM has the potential to inform intervention strategies that target the interaction between an individual and his or her social environment.

Tags

Agent-based modeling Sexual inhibition Sexual motivation Sexual risk taking