Chaos Theory and Social Cognition

We will review the last contributions of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems to the field of social cognition, specially

Vallacher and Nowak (2009).

Social relations evolve and change in the absence of external influences. Psychological systems display intrinsic dynamics. Three basic types of attractors have been identified: fixed-point attractors, periodic attractors and deterministic chaos. A fixed-point attractor describes the case in which the the state of the system converges to a stable value. It is similar to the notion of homeostasis. It corresponds, for example, to a desired goal. Multiple fixed-point attractors express that people can have different (perhaps contradictory) goals and patterns of social behavior.

Some systems display oscillatory behavior. A temporal pattern showing this tendency is a periodic attractor. Social judgement often oscillates between positive and negative assessments.

Chaos represents a possibility in many social phenomena. Social psychology presents many nonlinear phenomena, such as complex interactions among variables or inverted-U relations.

Social interdependence is very important to game theoretic approaches in Psychology, for instance, the prisoner´s dilemma game. So, Nowak et al. (1990) used cellular automata to model the dynamics of social influence. Each individual had three properties: an opinion on a topic, a degree of persuasive strength, ans a position in a social space. In each round of the computer simulations, one individual was chosen and influence was computed for each opinion in the group. The updating rule was the following: the individual changed the opinion to match the prevailing opinion if the resultant strength for this opinion position was greater than the strength of the individual´s current position. The minority opinion survived by forming clusters of like-minded people.

The dynamical account of social influence describes how the state of a single individual depends on the state of other individuals. However, individuals are best conceptualized as displaying patterns of change rather as a set of states. Social influence can be approached as the coordination over time of individual dynamics. Individuals in a relationship are represented as separate systems capable of displaying rich dynamics. A recent model of synchronization has been developed by Nowak, Vallacher and Zochowski (2002). Coupled logistic maps are used in this model. The behavior of each individual not only depends on the preceding state but also on the preceding state of the other person.

Dynamical social psychology has generated a deep source of formalisms but social reality can not be confused with physical reality. Individuals are not interchangeable in the way that atoms are. People live in a symbolic world and do not respond in a reactive way to the objective features if the environment. For it, human dynamics contain some degree of randomness, and human behavior is often unpredictable and perhaps chaotic.

Clint Sprott (Fractal image)