The First Steps Towards Asimov's Psychohistory?

lawrencekhoo writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about the Gottman Institute's (a.k.a. the love lab) work on modeling the dynamics of marital conversations. These models are described in John Gottman et. al.'s recent book The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press). Should be an interesting read for anyone who ever wondered if human interactions could be mathematically modeled."

Comments

non-register link

[Anonymous Coward]

Here.

Re:Psychohistory?

[gonzo_bozo]

Yep. Here's what the master said:

"Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again."

Re:Psychohistory was terrible science

[buyo-kun]

Statistics supports your first statement, it doesn't detract from it.

Actually, I'm pretty sure you're wrong, the thing is, when you're flipping a coin the past results don't effect the future results. In psychohistory, the past effects the future, so if you predict a city falling, and a new city coming into existence and making a war fleet and the city never falls, just by chance, it messes up your results causing your plans to mess up.

so sorry cowboy

[Madcapjack]

Using mathematics to describe and/or model behaviour is not new, not even in sociology. so this article is no surprise to me. though i do have to say, it is only in the last 10 years that this sort of thing has been done on a mass scale.

if your'e interested in this sort of thing, google the following topics: game theory, evolutionary game theory, network theory (graph theory), social network theory, evolutionary game theory in networks, agent-based modelling, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, memetics. For a general entry into complexity sciences, go to www.santafe.edu The Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, and finding the working papers page(s). Lots of stuff to read there. And for an excellent discussion of the reasons why we should use mathematics in sociology at all (why it isn't just descriptive) look for Dwight Read's paper, On the Utility of Mathematical Reasoning in Anthropology. google it.