Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

Foreword

Trying to understand human behavior has probably been a human passion since the first cavewoman tried to figure out why her mate could never remember to wipe his feet before coming inside. We're still at it, working with ever more sophisticated approaches and for increasingly important outcomes.

My own experience in this area started out when I was working at NASA to help design an autopilot for the Space Shuttle vehicle. It worked great when there was no astronaut in the loop, but when they started wrangling the controls themselves, the astronauts were not exactly enamored with my design and the way it behaved. Dismay would be a word that might apply here, but I went back to school to figure out why and soon became enmeshed in trying to understand human self‐motion perception and control, by bringing together established theory, controlled experimentation, and computational modeling. It was an eye‐opener on how complicated even the simplest of human behaviors could be, as well as the beginning of a long foray into developing and using computational models in this arena.

Of course, as I later discovered, there's a long history of this, perhaps going as far back as the 1880s with Ernst Mach and his pioneering work in visual and vestibular psychophysics and certainly at least the 1940s to Norbert Weiner with his introduction of cybernetics and the mathematical modeling of both humans and machines. Since then, many other disciplines have contributed and elaborated ...