Dynamical Systems in Social Psychology

A dynamical system refers to a set of elements that interact in complex, often nonlinear ways to form coherent patterns. Because of the complexity of these interactions, the system as a whole may evolve over time in seemingly unpredictable ways as new patterns of behavior emerge. This metatheory has proven useful in understanding diverse phenomena in meteorology, population biology, statistical mechanics, economics, and cosmology. The book demonstrates how the dynamical systems perspective can be applied to theory construction and research in social psychology, and in doing so, provides fresh insight into such complex phenomena as interpersonal behavior, social relations, attitudes, and social cognition.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Vallacher, Robin R.

Nowak, Andrzej

Mental Health

Academic Press

Dynamical Grammar: Minimalism, Acquisition, and Change

Dynamical Grammar explores the consequences for language acquisition, language evolution, and linguistic theory of taking the underlying architecture of the language faculty to be that of a complex adaptive dynamical system. It contains the first results of a new and complex model of language acquisition which the authors have developed to measure how far language input is reflected in language output and thereby get a better idea of just how far the human language faculty is hard-wired.

Test Preparation

Culicover, Peter W.

Professional

Oxford University Press

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Social Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice

Social Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice details how social entrepreneurship can creatively solve pressing and seemingly insurmountable social problems. Theories of social change are presented to help demystify the "magic" of making an immense, yet durable and irreversible social impact. In-depth case studies from multiple disciplines and from around the globe document how social entrepreneurs foster bottom-up change that empowers people and societies. The authors review the specific personality traits of social entrepreneurs and introduce the new leadership model required for 21st-century development. This book is valuable to undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students, while remaining accessible to non-academic readers due to its clear language, illustrative case studies, and guidelines on how to apply social entrepreneurship, or become a successful social entrepreneur.

Praszkier, Ryszard

Psychology & Counseling

Cambridge University Press

The Forgotten Appeasement of 1920 examines a turning point in East European history: the summer of 1920, when Lenin’s Soviet Russia decided to challenge the Versailles system and launch a military attack on the continent. 
The outcome of this attack might have been the occupation of all of Poland and East Central Europe, and a Red Army sweep further west. This book probes the British–Soviet negotiations and diplomatic operations behind the scenes. Professor Nowak uses hitherto unexamined documents from Russian and British archives to show how (and why) top British politicians were ready to accept a new Russian imperial control over the whole of Eastern Europe. Nowak unravels this previously untold story of that first and forgotten appeasement, stopped only by the Polish military victory over the Red Army. His excellent historical craftsmanship and new sources contribute to the book’s quality, filling up a lacuna in contemporary historiography. 
This book will appeal to researchers of geopolitical affairs and the Great Powers, the history of Poland, and the political mentality of Western elites. It will also be of interest to university students and tutors, scholars of history and international relations and – thanks to the book’s brisk and fascinating narrative – amateur historians and history aficionados.

The Forgotten Appeasement of 1920 (Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe)

Routledge

Traditional approaches to social psychology have proven highly successful in identifying causal mechanisms underlying human thought and behavior. With the recent advent of the dynamical approach, it is now possible to assemble sets of such mechanisms into coherent systems. This book uses innovative concepts and tools to illuminate the processes by which individuals, groups, and societies evolve and change in a systemic, self-sustaining manner, at times seemingly independent of external influences. Readers learn how the dynamical approach facilitates novel predictions and insights into such social psychological phenomena as attitudes, social judgment, goal-directed behavior, attraction, and relationships. Featuring a wealth of charts and figures derived from original research and computer simulations, the volume is grounded in classic and contemporary theories of social psychology.

Dynamical Social Psychology

The Guilford Press

Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations (Peace Psychology Book Series)

Conflict is inherent in virtually every aspect of human relations, from sport to parliamentary democracy, from fashion in the arts to paradigmatic challenges in the sciences, and from economic activity to intimate relationships. Yet, it can become among the most serious social problems humans face when it loses its constructive features and becomes protracted over time with no obvious means of resolution.
 This book addresses the subject of intractable social conflict from a new vantage point. Here, these types of conflict represent self-organizing phenomena, emerging quite naturally from the ongoing dynamics in human interaction at any scale―from the interpersonal to the international. Using the universal language and computational framework of nonlinear dynamical systems theory in combination with recent insights from social psychology, intractable conflict is understood as a system locked in special attractor states that constrain the thoughts and actions of the parties to the conflict. The emergence and maintenance of attractors for conflict can be described by means of formal models that incorporate the results of computer simulations, experiments, field research, and archival analyses. Multi-disciplinary research reflecting these approaches provides encouraging support for the dynamical systems perspective.
 Importantly, this text presents new views on conflict resolution. In contrast to traditional approaches that tend to focus on basic, short-lived cause-effect relations, the dynamical perspective emphasizes the temporal patterns and potential for emergence in destructive relations. Attractor deconstruction entails restoring complexity to a conflict scenario by isolating elements or changing the feedback loops among them. The creation of a latent attractor trades on the tendency toward multi-stability in dynamical systems and entails the consolidation of incongruent (positive) elements into a coherent structure. In the bifurcation scenario, factors are identified that can change the number and types of attractors in a conflict scenario. The implementation of these strategies may hold the key to unlocking intractable conflict, creating the potential for constructive social relations.

Coleman, Peter T.

Bui-Wrzosinska, Lan

Liebovitch, Larry

Kugler, Katharina

Bartoli, Andrea

Springer

This introductory text is devoted to exposing the underlying nature of price formation in financial markets as a predominantly sociological phenomenon that relates individual decision-making to emergent and co-evolving social and financial structures.
Two different levels of this sociological influence are considered: First, we examine how price formation results from the social dynamics of interacting individuals, where interaction occurs either through the price or by direct communication. Then the same processes are revisited and examined at the level of larger groups of individuals.
In this book, models of both levels of socio-finance are presented, and it is shown, in particular, how complexity theory provides the conceptual and methodological tools needed to understand and describe such phenomena. Accordingly, readers are first given a broad introduction to the standard economic theory of rational financial markets and will come to understand its shortcomings with the help of concrete examples. Complexity theory is then introduced in order to properly account for behavioral decision-making and match the observed market dynamics.
This book is conceived as a primer for newcomers to the field, as well as for practitioners seeking new insights into the field of complexity science applied to socio-economic systems in general, and financial markets and price formation in particular.

An Introduction to Socio-Finance

Vitting Andersen, Jørgen

Conflict is inherent in virtually every aspect of human relations, from sport to parliamentary democracy, from fashion in the arts to paradigmatic challenges in the sciences, and from economic activity to intimate relationships.  Yet, it can become among the most serious social problems humans face when it loses its constructive features and becomes protracted over time with no obvious means of resolution. This book addresses the subject of intractable social conflict from a new vantage point.  Here, these types of conflict represent self-organizing phenomena, emerging quite naturally from the ongoing dynamics in human interaction at any scale―from the interpersonal to the international.  Using the universal language and computational framework of nonlinear dynamical systems theory in combination with recent insights from social psychology, intractable conflict is understood as a system locked in special attractor states that constrain the thoughts and actions of the parties to the conflict.  The emergence and maintenance of attractors for conflict can be described by means of formal models that incorporate the results of computer simulations, experiments, field research, and archival analyses.  Multi-disciplinary research reflecting these approaches provides encouraging support for the dynamical systems perspective. Importantly, this text presents new views on conflict resolution.  In contrast to traditional approaches that tend to focus on basic, short-lived cause-effect relations, the dynamical perspective emphasizes the temporal patterns and potential for emergence in destructive relations.  Attractor deconstruction entails restoring complexity to a conflict scenario by isolating elements or changing the feedback loops among them.  The creation of a latent attractor trades on the tendency toward multi-stability in dynamical systems and entails the consolidation of incongruent (positive) elements into a coherent structure.  In the bifurcation scenario, factors are identified that can change the number and types of attractors in a conflict scenario.  The implementation of these strategies may hold the key to unlocking intractable conflict, creating the potential for constructive social relations.   

Vallacher, Robin R. R.

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