Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation of Social Processes

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The formal analysis of social processes has a tradition of at least four decades. The leading article of the second part of Herbert A. Simon’s “Models of Man” (Simon 1957, pp. 99–114) — the famous formalization of Homans’ theory of interaction in social groups (Homans 1950) -, an article which originally appeared in April, 1953, is concerned with a mathematical macro model of the process ongoing in a social group (taken as a whole), four attributes of which (intensity of interaction, level of friendliness, amount of endogenous activity, and amount of activity imposed by the external environment) are taken as time-dependent functions in a system of linear differential equations. A (mathematically) similar approach was taken in Richardson’s famous arms race model the first version of which was published in 1948 (Richardson 1948). The late fifties and early sixties saw the first computer simulation models, e.g. of election campaigns (cf., e.g., Sola Pool and Abelson 1962), while at the end of the sixties and in the seventies global modelling was en vogue2 (cf., e.g., Forrester 1980, 1971, Meadows 1974). At about that time, mathematical modelling and computer simulation were introduced to Germany, too (cf., e.g., Mayntz 1968, Ziegler 1972).