Modeling Generic Structures and Patterns in Social Psychology

System dynamics has been enriched from many disciplines. This paper describes our effort to discover generic structures in the field of social psychology. Social psychologists have accumulated a body of empirical studies and theories that are reproducible and apply to a variety of social situations. Our task was to start modeling a few pivotal dynamic effects found in the social psychology literature. We present models of the dynamics of an important social process, namely, the “self-fulfilling prophecy.” The structure underlying this process is associated with the drifting goals archetype. Next we model the dynamic effects of contact between groups. Finally, we develop a set of models that represent a key process in social psychology, namely the “fundamental attribution error.” We hope that the approach to modeling generic structures in social psychology will enrich future system dynamics models by including relevant biases and distortions in perception discovered by social psychologists.