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The Dynamics of Decisions: Modeling Sudden Changes in Group Behavior March 2009
To test the adage "It's a small world," sociologist Stanley Milgram in 1967 conducted a now famous experiment. He sent packages to 160 random people in Nebraska with instructions to forward them to a stockbroker in Boston whom he identified only by name and rough location. In the instructions, he wrote, "If you do not know the target person on a personal basis, do not try to contact him directly. Instead, mail this folder to a personal acquaintance who is more likely than you to know the target person." Milgram found that the average package passed through six sets of hands to reach the Boston stockbroker. From this experiment (whose methods are questioned by many modern sociologists), we derived the popular theory (and celebrity game) of "six degrees of separation," which contends that everyone in the world is connected by six links along social networks. Milgram noted in his study that three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for a majority of the delivered packages. Malcolm Gladwell, in his acclaimed book Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, touched on this finding and suggested that certain types of people are better at disseminating information. Lashon Booker, an artificial intelligence engineer who initiated MITRE's "Modeling Phase Change Behavior" research project (along with former MITRE employee Gary Strong), wondered whether understanding how those "disseminators" spread information through their social groups may provide insight into how those groups reacted to that information. "As our defense sponsors concern themselves more and more with analyzing the behavior of organizations that are coalesced around fervent ideologies rather than specific individuals, understanding better how and why the behavior of such group changes is crucial," explains Booker. "To help our sponsors understand these changes, we are developing models to demonstrate how social groups simplify decision-making for individual members through the group's various defining influences. Hopefully with this understanding, our sponsors will gain a better insight into the behavior dynamics of leaderless organizations and other social groups." Setting the Stage for Big Changes Booker explains that every day we are faced with innumerable decisions from the profound to the mundane: "Who should I be? How should I behave? What should I wear?" And for each decision, there are countless acceptable solutions. Anyone forced to sort through all those solutions for all those decisions based only on his own limited experience and reasoning would be paralyzed with indecision. So humans evolved a strategy for making decisions based on other people's experience and reasoning. We enroll in one or more social groups, each of which has developed a consensus solution to a set of problems, and then adopt the solutions of those groups. A college student might join the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and stop eating meat or a father might join the Parent Teacher Association and start volunteering at school. But the interaction between the group and its members is never one-way. As each new member adapts his behavior to fit comfortably within the group, the behavior of the group is affected by the expectations of the new member. Each member constantly tests the effectiveness of the group's solutions, while the group constantly adds the experience and reasoning of its members to its collective decision making. Throw into the group a few individuals with a conscious or unconscious talent for influencing groups and you set the stage for a phase change, a sudden, group-wide change in behavior. For a clique of teenagers, a phase change might mean showing up at the bus stop in a radically different wardrobe. For a loosely knit leaderless group, that might mean a shift from indifference toward a particular ideology to fervent support of the cause. Modeling the Paper Chase The ability to predict such a phase change in various social identity groups would be invaluable to our sponsors. But, says Booker, "most of the work being done in analyzing social networks focuses on the relationships between individuals in the network. We are developing models that focus on the relationship between the individual and the group." To conduct his research, Booker needed to find a social group that could provide him with the reliable data he needed. He chose to draw his data from the domain of scientific publications since information about published papers is readily available. Framing the practice of writing and presenting of papers as a social activity, Booker theorized that the choices scientists make in deciding with which scientists to collaborate, about which topics to write, and at which conferences to present their papers would reveal the formation and influences of social identity groups. "I'm interested in the way that the social networks that form among these scientists might influence individual choices in topics, and the way papers written by a few individuals might generate a change in the prevalent topics among the whole group," Booker says. "Our initial work on treating topics as group attributes has already proven to be useful. We have developed a computational approach to extracting a group 'fingerprint' from a document collection that allows us to identify the likely group affiliation of a new document." Increasing Awareness, Not Offering Predictions Once the research is completed, Booker expects that it will provide insights about how to identify the attributes that influence the way individuals choose groups and the way groups recruit members. A better understanding of those processes will aid our sponsors in collecting the correct kind of data to anticipate radical changes in group behavior. But Booker shies away from claiming that the research will facilitate predictions about specific outcomes. "Rather than claiming that it could make predictions, I would say that the research would help our sponsors be able to see approaching situations where drastic phase changes were possible and even likely. So that's not a prediction. That's just giving our sponsors an increased awareness of what the range of outcomes is and allowing them to take appropriate actions." The More, the Merrier Booker, having little background in social science, never would imagine himself applying his modeling expertise to a problem such as phase change behavior unless he was working at MITRE. "There's such an opportunity for the cross mixing of ideas here. In the brainstorming sessions for this project, the social scientists on the team will throw out ideas on group behavior as they relate to modeling, and I'll chew it around, and then I'll propose some modeling ideas as they relate to group behavior, and they'll chew it around. We then go back and forth until we end up at the same place." As Booker notes, by collecting experts in a broad range of subjects, such as computational modeling and social science, encouraging collaboration between those experts, and providing them with the best tools to do so, MITRE can present its sponsors with solutions to some of their most pressing challenges. —by Christopher Lockheardt Related Information Articles and News
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