I am a new member here ... and while I know modern psych. is probably not people's cup of tea on Psychohistory.org, still I would like to know - based on Asimov's discussions in the Foundation Series - what types of psychological models - Cognitive, Behavioral, et al - "would" best fit in with an Asimovian style mathematics/science of psychohistory? Any ideas?

I'd appreciate your inputs. Thanks.

Hi all,
I am new to this group and I have a couple of opinions about this matter. IMO the direction that a society takes in a particular circumstance is determned by the average mental make up of the society and the parts of that make up which have anything directly related to the problem. Suppose that the society we talk abt is basically a very violent society with harsh sentences regularly meted out to small crimes like it still is in many parts of the world, we would have matters relating to physical violence taken as regular matters and notvery seriously. On the contrary, if the group of people within which something violent has happened is a rather peaceful community, the resulting reactions of several indivuduals and the society as a whole is quite different.

So I believe that to be able to predict the future from the use of mathematical techniques, we would have to impose constraints about the kind of society we are dealing with and the influences that are on it right now. So its basically a comnbination of the porevious state of the society, the social machinery and the trends towards different issues which will give the resulting reactions of the sociuety to corcumstances and then we can take the next quasi-satble state and use that to predict what state things will be at after a time.

What do you think?

--Fulcrum

Thanks to Fulcrum for the reply. I tend to think that, while it is true that we must indeed look to the ‘mental makeup of a society’ in order to understand its historical-experiential direction, we must be cautious that we’re really putting our finger on such a psychology and not just falling into the trap of cultural stereotyping (say, from our society to another with a culture different from our own). It’s way too easy, here, to mistake the real psychological characteristics of people in a social psychological sense with the visible cultural dimensions of a society and end up by concluding this is a people’s distinctive ‘mentality.’ If we fall for that trap, then at most, we’ve stumbled on just the surface culture of a society. And, in the least, all we’ve done is projected our own ideological visions/cultural meaning systems of how we perceive things onto other societies. And, at that point, we’re not studying other societies at all – but just witnessing our reflection in the mirror of what we believe are the psychological characteristics of other peoples.

I still think Fulcrum may be on the overall right track, though, with these ideas.

One thing, I believe, that may be of great assistance in the development/envisioning of a wider social scientific Psycho-History is the research now being done on the relation between the field of Complexity Theory and psychological science. Towards this end, the work being done by the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences is excellent. I invite you all, if you haven’t seen their stuff yet to check out the following websites.

www.societyforchaostheory.org . . .
list.uvm.edu . . .

I’m hoping the information is helpful to you.

-- Brassbabboon

Hi all,

Thanks Brassbabboon for your comments. To move along somewhat and provide a better picture of what I have in mind, I shall explain a pet theory of mine (everyone has theirs, and some have worked...) that I have had in mind for some time and tried out for some time (in vain)...this is in view of the psychological theory being discussed.

I start simulation of a population from an organizational setup. I take the hierarchial structure of a typical organization and assign person instances to each of these positions. Now each of these person instances has a set of traits. The traits measure the inputs and the outputs to and from these building blocks, and the distribution of these traits is sensibly done or rather conventionally done.

I have preliminarily defined these traits as ability, perception, control and communication, the first two being input aiding traits and the next two being output aiding traits. Then we have the work coming in, information associated with this work, and now the control and communication traits shd distributed with bias towards the higher levels of hierarchy.

We can get a closed loop system which depends on the output info being judged by the higher levels of the hierarchy and percieved as per their perception capabilities...then they use their control and their communication traits to guide the system in another direction.

The idea is to model these things into different systems in the govt and influential private organizations as much as possible and assign the right kinds of values and hope for the best!!

This is rather much of a brute force method, and a simple excel sheet can simulate the structure and fucntioning of a small organization with simple goals.

The organization here must be taken in its true literal meaning...we could also perhaps use the same system for other hierarchial structures or even non-hierarchial ones...

Earlier I had tried the MBTI personality indicators (personality traits like ENTJ, INTP, etc) to give me the person's variables and that got me somewhere butI figured its required a lot of interpretation and thats where I used to go wrong...so I am turning to this method. One problem with the method is that its a static method and doesnt take time into acct. I think thats a serious prob, but its atleast a start towards something simple...

I found the primer very interesting - Im going through it in detail. Thanks very much for the links, Brassababboon...
Do tell me what you think about it.

--Fulcrum

Thank you , Fulcrum , for the ‘thanks’ and for your ideas in the reply. Your points are interesting and they bring me back to an organizational behavior course I’d taken several years ago. Same principles tying together soc./psych., that were in that OB class, apply here too … I think that’s an excellent way of modeling the dynamics of Psycho History in the Asimovian sense of the concept.

You may want to also reference the material by Bob Gregory on systems theory/human ecology for the benefit of your simulation model. It’s at

wsarch.ucr.edu . . ..

Hope this can be of further use to you, especially where you’d like to incorporate time-elements and human process into the mix.

- Brassbabboon

Hi Brassbabboon,

The URL was interesting...this is very close indeed to what we are talking about. The pics of the elements and the networks which are analyzed are quite interesting as well, and I am just about to throurughly read up on the paper and on some other things.

I know the topic of the post sounds odd, but here goes. I believe that this system of analysis just like any other depends on the principles of least energy or rather minimum energy availability to get to a state of equillibrium. If you were a student of thermodynamics you might have realized what I am talking about.

Basically according to thermodynamics, all systems are constructed in such a way that they attain minimum energy condition to attain equillibrium, and hence all natural systems tend to a state of a best energy distribution, usually minimum energy. So for instance responsbility is best distributed to a greater extent at the higher levels of a hierarchy and work is better distributed to towards the lower levels...

So the idea is to construct a network of hierarchies and then decide on a distribution for the different variables like work, responsibility, authority, communication, etc...and we can have quasi-random variations in the traits of the individuals in the hierarchy which will then decide the best arrangement for the least energy distro...

I found a paper on entropy and human activity :

oak.cats.ohiou.edu . . .

Hope you find this interesting...

--Fulcrum

Thanks, Fulcrum, for the link to that paper and your comments. It adds a bunch to our discussion, and the ways in which psych. and soc. can be used to model the Asimovian psychohistorical concept. You might also want to look at this material from the World System Network (WSN) discussion forum. Start with these links, but check out the expanded topic threads on the issue as well.

csf.colorado.edu . . .
csf.colorado.edu . . .
csf.colorado.edu . . .
csf.colorado.edu . . .

It should be helpful to you.

My next post to Psychohistory.org is going to be on how we might apply material from Jean Piaget and other psych. theory people to our inquiry into psychological-historical dynamics.

More later ...

-- Brassbabboon

Hi Brassbabboon,

Those were interesting links you sent in last time. The site (and its journal) has analysed many key issues and I am reading up on the same. Thanks for the information.

I have been working out a few details about a quantity called "social entropy" for which I am using game theory and simple 2-person zero sum games at this point. I will post more on this soon.

Thats all for now...

--Fulcrum

I would like to see your game theory ideas, they sound interesting.