Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems
by Paul K. Davis, Angela O'Mahony, Jonathan Pfautz
12 Moving Social‐Behavioral Modeling Forward: Insights from Social Scientists
Matthew Brashears1, Melvin Konner2, Christian Madsbjerg3, Laura McNamara4 and Katharine Sieck5,*
1 Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA
2 Department of Anthropology and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA
3 ReD Associates, New York, NY, 10004, USA
4 Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, 87123, USA
5,* RAND Corporation, Pardee RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, CA, 90407, USA
As part of preparing a large volume of contributed papers (Davis et al. 2019), the editors sought some step‐back‐and‐think contributions from noted social scientists who might have suggestions as we move forward in the process of improving social‐behavioral models. After all, in our rush to understand people by mining their vast troves of receipts, running paths, texts, search queries, tweets, and likes, there is great value to a thoughtful consideration of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we intend to do it. The editors and I (Sieck) brought together four researchers who might have such suggestions for computational modeling based on their decades of work serving as translators and brokers between the social sciences and other disciplines: engineering, modeling, medicine, data science, and so on. These authors have spent their careers crossing the lines between qualitative and quantitative or explanatory ...