Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

30 Multi‐Scale Resolution of Human Social Systems: A Synergistic Paradigm for Simulating Minds and Society

Mark G. Orr

Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA

Introduction

Recently, we put forth an initial sketch of what we call the Resolution Thesis Orr et al. (2018). The thesis holds that (i) models of cognition will be improved given constraints from the structure and dynamics of the social systems in which they are embedded and (ii) the resolution of social simulations of agents will be improved given constraints from cognitive first principles. ¹ This thesis reflects a variety of motivations, the most obvious being the observation that there is little overlap between the cognitive sciences and the generative social science approach, both of which rely heavily on computer simulation to understand aspects of human systems, albeit at different levels of scale. The former focuses almost exclusively on the mind as a scientific object of study for which the lion's share of simulation efforts reflect methods that represent a generalizable conception of the mind, and the latter emphasizes multiple aspects of social systems, the mind being only one of these aspects. Thus, we seem to have some kind of historical trade‐off: the details of one level of scale result in the potential oversimplification at the other level of scale. We posit, by the resolution thesis, that an interdependence between cognitive science and ...