Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

1 Understanding and Improving the Human Condition: A Vision of the Future for Social‐Behavioral Modeling

Jonathan Pfautz¹, Paul K. Davis² and Angela O'Mahony²

¹ Information Innovation Office (I20), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, VA, 22203‐2114, USA

² RAND Corporation and Pardee RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, CA, 90407-2138, USA

Technology is transforming the human condition at an ever‐increasing pace. New technologies emerge and dramatically change our daily lives in months rather than years. Yet, key aspects of the human condition – our consciousness, personalities and emotions, beliefs and attitudes, perceptions, decisions and behaviors, and social relationships – have long resisted description in terms of scientific, falsifiable laws like those found in the natural sciences. Past advances in our knowledge of the human condition have had valuable impacts, ¹ but much more is possible. New technologies are providing extraordinary opportunity for gaining deeper understanding and, significantly, for using that understanding to help realize the immense positive potential of the humankind.

In the information age our understanding of the human condition is deepening with new ways to observe, experiment, and understand behavior. These range from, say, identifying financial and spatiotemporal data that correlate with individual well‐being to drawing on the narratives of social media and other communications to infer population‐wide beliefs, ...