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Identity Groups in Decision Making By Lashon B. Booker How many high-consequence decisions—buying a house, changing jobs, investing money— do you make where you first patiently gather all the facts, resolve ambiguities, rationally consider alternatives, and, after all of that, only then decide? In fact, the sheer number of such choices would be overwhelming if it were not for the fact that we have evolved a shortcut in decision making: We do not usually solve problems directly, but rather we rely on similar problems having been solved in the past and adopt those solutions as our own.
There is always more than one solution to a problem, and many of those solutions are preserved by culture and its institutions. How do we decide among the options culture provides? This is where identity groups lend a hand. Each cultural solution is associated with at least one identity group. We economize our decision making by first deciding which identity groups to follow and then adopting their associated solutions. Such identity groups may include family, friends, business partners, or others. Our government is showing an increased interest in studying how social systems affect individual actions and vice versa. MITRE's "Modeling Phase Change Behavior" project is addressing this need by studying the role of identity groups in social group formation and dynamics. Survival of the Fittest Whenever an individual acts using guidance from a specific group, they are testing the solutions provided by that group. Success is defined as the individual benefiting from the group's solution. A successful result may encourage continued participation by the individual in the group and continuation of the group in the long run. Lack of success is defined as the individual losing some benefit from having taken the action proffered by the group. A failed result may lead the individual to lose interest in continuing participation in the group, and the group losing out in a small way on its own chance of survival and the ability to represent culture to the served population.
Current research in the "Modeling Phase Change Behavior" project is using these insights to develop models of the way identity groups influence the growth of social networks. Our modeling framework includes components for individual agents as well as the identity groups to which agents may belong. It allows groups to have attributes and associated information without needing to have specific members, and allows agents to associate with groups without having to interact with other individual group members, at least initially. This capability is critically important for many of the applications of interest to MITRE sponsors, because some social groups cannot only be leaderless and "organizationless," but memberless for periods of time as well. Such a possibility is accounted for by the potential for the persistence of group identity on the Internet over spans of time when there may be no group members at all. The Invisible College MITRE began designing its identity group model with data from the relatively simple domain of scientific publication. In this domain, data about agent interactions (co-authorship of a scientific paper), identity groups (authors who publish at the same conference), and identity group attributes (characteristic topics and citations) are relatively easy to extract from sources in the open literature. The goal of these studies is to understand how collaborative teams of co-authors build a social network that eventually forms an "invisible college" in some field of study. We are particularly interested in understanding and modeling how identity group attributes influence the way teams are assembled. Follow-on studies will examine issues of group recruitment, adaptation of individual attributes upon recruitment, and group competition in this setting. The lessons learned about groups from this preliminary research will eventually be applied to modeling recruitment for groups such as leaderless resistance groups. The key to extending our preliminary investigations to cover a broad variety of social groups is to focus on the identity group attributes related to group control. Groups typically use social control mechanisms to encourage members to conform to the group identity. Members who fail to conform to the group norms suffer consequences, and the prospect of those consequences is an important aspect of the way groups influence individual behavior. We hypothesize that much of what we learn from our modeling framework in the scientific domain will transfer to other social groups, as long as we can identify the right set of control-related attributes. By understanding better how we all are influenced by culture when making decisions in our lives, MITRE hopes to offer the government guidance on how to hamper our enemies from making decisions and taking actions against the U.S.. |
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For more information, please contact Lashon Booker using the employee directory. Page last updated: October 9, 2008 | Top of page |
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