Using sociometrics and technological growth to better understand human behaviour

The sociometrics project aims to take advantage of the recent exponential growth in technological innovations to focus on questions that will benefit from a better biological micro-foundation for our understanding of the behaviour of individual humans, as well as from the ability to observe, track, and map individuals’ interactions with one another. The project will also provide a better empirical testing of theories and concepts developed many decades ago in such areas as cybernetics, systems theory, and nonlinear science.

Why is this important?

The increasing use of rigorous scientific methods to answer long-standing questions in the social sciences is producing an environment in which the boundaries between economics, social psychology, and sociology have become increasingly fluid, facilitating what Edward O. Wilson called the mind’s greatest enterprise: promoting the linkage between sciences and humanities. Technological advances in neuroscience, particularly in wearable, nonintrusive, and non-invasive instruments, have opened fruitful new research avenues for the social sciences, on which they are likely in turn to have a major impact. Monitoring physiological processes through non-intrusive means such as surface electrodes, is attractive for its potential to identify psychological or mental processes that are otherwise hard to measure.

Research into how we mentally cope with the complexity faced constantly in daily life is limited by existing technology and comes at a high price. For example, high resolution data derived from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is extremely costly because of the sheer magnitude of the equipment and technology needed to retrieve it. Nor are such instruments wearable during daily activities. The sociometrics project will take advantage of the recent exponential growth in technological innovations including the production of an increasing array of wearable sensors that allow the mapping of the behaviours and interactions of large numbers of individuals in their natural everyday environments. More than 4.6 billion unique mobile phone subscribers, offers a clear potential in this area. Smart phones or wearable electronic badges with integrated sensors offer a variety of possibilities for simultaneously tracking the digital footprint of hundreds or thousands of individuals over days, months, or even years. For example, a phone with an emotion-sensing application can provide information on an individual’s habits, movements, conversation patterns, health status, and social network, as well as contextual factors such as ambient sound. The ‘reality mining’ facilitated by such instruments has the power to increase the external validity of social science research orders of magnitude beyond what is possible using other methods of primary data collection.

What we aim to do

Wearable technologies allow researchers to move beyond the artificiality of a subject lying in an fMRI scanner during an experiment, while also complementing the use of surveys, helping to compensate for their inherent problems of reporting biases, memory errors, and scarcity of continuous data. If we are to gain realistic insights into complex phenomena such as human intentions, goals, wishes, conflicts, and values, we must not only combine sets of measurements and diverse tools but also pool the data derived from particular situations with randomized controlled trials and/or link them to historical natural experiments. This project will focus on questions that will benefit from a better biological micro-foundation for our understanding of the behaviour of individual humans, as well as from the ability to observe, track, and map individuals’ interactions with one another.

The brain and body interacts in the generation of emotions, thus any realistic theory of thinking, acting, and problem solving must incorporate the influence of emotion. The environment in which humans act is complex. Any realistic model of human behaviour must be able to handle interdependencies between underlying model assumptions, observed social communications, and the resulting individual behaviour. The Sociometrics project will provide a better empirical testing of theories and concepts developed many decades ago in such areas as cybernetics, systems theory, and nonlinear science. Micro-level sensory data in particular can guide both micro and macro-oriented research endeavours such as agent based modelling, feedback loops, and network theory. Combining these factors can catalyse the exploration of heuristics that guide individuals’ behaviour to the identification of emergent behaviour patterns in society that integrate contextual forces. Information gathered by sensing devices could also potentially be used to improve the functioning of teams, work groups, organizations, and even society in general as they may further illuminate the structure of decision making and interpersonal processes.

Our understanding of how humans perceive and think about a particular situation can also be improved by accommodating both verbal and nonverbal communication, and by seeking the patterns in a dynamic exchange rather than simple behavioural endpoints of social processes. Interaction between individuals produces the social fabric. Thus, new organizational arrangements create new opportunities for individuals. Hence, just as living systems co-evolve with their environment, human behaviour co-evolves within the social fabric, and both social and individual factors determine the interactions that influence individual preferences, beliefs, and opportunities. The social fabric inherently affects decision makers’ learning and cognition, with this influence frequently going unrecognized by decision makers themselves. Large scale sensory data can assist in such endeavours by helping to map the system and the feedback loops that characterize it over time, creating strong path dependence. Continuous and fine-grained data streams prevent the loss of information like ‘footprints in the sand’. Insights in this project will feed back also into the scientometrics project. Both bodies of research raise many important questions. What steps are involved in the mechanism of innovation? Which mixture of competition and co-operation would produce high versus low levels of creativity and innovation in a society? Can progress be hastened, so that the wait for new ideas is reduced? Could an explosion of niches in the form of self-maintaining structures be manufactured, providing an opportunity for society, scientists, or the modern world in general to escape from what Gell-Mann calls the ‘intellectual rut in which we are trapped?’.

For more information about this project please email best@qut.edu.au