Governance and Society

Priority Challenges for Social and Behavioral Research and Its Modeling

“…This said, the prob lem may be "impossible in princi ple but more tractable in practice." In a given study, researchers can address the issues, as some have done in multimodeling experiments in recent years that addressed complex po liti cal, military, and economic interactions in simulated intervention operations (Lofdahl, 2010) and connecting agent-based network models and a system-dynamic-style model (Carley, 2012;Levis et al, 2010). It seems that great advances could be made with a combination of (1) a concept of best practices, (2) methods that or ga nize thinking about composition, (3) modular development with better documentation and comprehensibility, and (4) technology that facilitates following the best practices, including systematic testing across the relevant state space and documenting as much as pos si ble assumptions that other wise would merely be in the head of the modeler/programmer.…”

“…Examples of potentially hidden assumptions include rational-analytic decisionmaking, system equilibrium in economics, or a flat-earth approximation.19 See discussions in the lit er a ture(Tolk, 2012b;Yilmaz and Ören, 2006; Yilmaz, 2006b;Yilmaz et al, 2007;and Yilmaz and Ören, 2009).20 We thank Cory Lofdahl for related discussions (see alsoLofdahl, 2010). The prob lems of dealing with a multiplicity of "tuning par ameters" are hardly unique to social-behavioral modeling.…”

“…Psychologists have studied within-individual variability of personality, drawing on a biologically based theoretical framework(Read et al, 2017). An early example used system dynamics to consider international issues related to climate, trade, and globalization(Lofdahl, 2001).19 In some lit er a ture, multiresolution modeling refers to modeling only at a detailed level, but then generating displays at lower resolution. That is not our meaning.…”