Bistability, Nash Equilibria, Relatively Dark Collectives, and Social Physics: Modeling the Social Behavior of Teams

Abstract

To reduce costs and increase effectiveness, a new theory is being sought to transform teams, enterprises, and systems with computational approaches of complex social behavior that create “smart” systems. A new theory is necessary because, unlike the physical sciences, the economic, organizational, and, in general, social sciences have no overarching theory of fundamental principles that build from individuals to collectives. Instead, social science is mostly a-theoretical, derived primarily from ad hoc studies of individuals. Many of the “rational” results emerging from methodological individualism models at the collective level are misleading, such as collaboration, supposedly associated with increased trust and social well-being; instead, we have found that the more collaboration is isolated from competition, the more knowledge generation is reduced, illusions increased, and social welfare made dysfunctional. With our theory, still crude at this stage of development, using bi-stability, a simplified form of interdependence, we have constructed a theory of the dynamics of collectives that naturally arise from illusions along with natural measures for the metrics of organizational performance based on relative (entropy) darkness. However, at the unit level, unlike building a bridge or robot, while predictions about social behavior are possible, our theory of interdependent uncertainty indicates that traditional explanations of social behavior are both unavoidable and irreducibly incomplete. We discuss the implications for enterprise transformation. Our theory will be applied in a future companion article.