Social Psychology and Complexity Theory

Whatever our specific substantive interests, I think that most of us in and around social psychology are continually intrigued by some of the almost magical phenomena that occur within our theoretical purview. Take " emergence, " for example. It still interests me, and sometimes amazes me, how individual behaviors emerge from the substrate of neurological and cognitive processing; how interpersonal patterns emerge from a substrate of social perceptions and repeated interactions; how small group structures and processes emerge from the activities of their members; and how larger structures maintain their integrity and evolve through time based on something having to do with the actions of their sub-parts. My amazement is shared by many in other fields of research. " Evolution " is another kind of magical phenomenon. I can dissect a computer program that illustrates the evolution of intelligence in a population of simulated entities. I can see the entire menu of behavioral and decision-making contingencies laid out before me, I can understand perfectly how the pieces all fit together, how the dynamics unfold, how the selection processes are implemented, and how the entities adapt to environmental contingencies after iterating the simulation for generations. But it all still has a magical quality. Social psychology as a discipline has not been especially interested in evolutionary processes, but there is a place for such work. Still another magical process, related to emergence and evolution, is feedback. It would be nice if social behavior proceeded step-by-step, actors behaving according to predetermined scripts. Knowing the scripts would be sufficient to explain and predict the ensuing patterns and structures. Fortunately for those who make their living trying to understand human social behavior, it's not this simple. If we have scripts, they are fluid and dynamic things. As behavioral sequences proceed, feedback is received continuously and steers the behavioral sequence down another of its infinite possible paths. The fact that the feedback itself emanates from other behavioral units also engaged in the dynamic sequence, also altering their actions based on feedback, ensures that the ensuing process will be a complex one. What's really interesting is that the array of individual behaviors and contingencies can be relatively simple. But when you throw feedback into the mix, all hell can break loose. I like social networks, too, for their tenuous balances of freedom and constraint at different levels of analysis. Under laboratory control, we can construct simple networks, …