I am sorry for crossposting - but it seams that the message was rejected by the
server
- Original Message -
From: Igor Matutinovic
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 6:35 PM
Subject: [Fis] INTRODUCING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY[Fis] INTRODUCING
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY
Joe posed the question Are there other concepts of complexity that can
fruitfully be applied to human systems?
Besides structural and organizational aspects of social (and ecological)
complexity that Joe mentioned in his text, there is a cognitive aspect of
complexity that is peculiar to human systems. It concerns directly the issue of
information processing and, consequently, the nature of the problem solving
process, which Joe identified as one of the causes producing social complexity.
Cognitive aspect of complexity in social systems can have at least three
distinct dimensions. One deals with the virtual impossibility for humans to
gather all the available information and compute the optimal decision among the
possible alternatives. In literature this is usually called the problem of
bounded rationality.
Another dimension of complexity comes from the fact that human decision making
is not only bounded by technical constraints related to information gathering
and processing but is also significantly constrained by a bias that comes from
the set of basic values and beliefs about the world and a society that a
decision maker holds in his mind. In that sense certain solutions to a problem,
which are technically accessible and rational, perhaps even optimal for an
external observer, are discarded or unrecognized as such because they clash
with certain socially shared beliefs and values (a worldview).
The third dimension might refer to self-referentiallity of human systems: we
are inclined to conform our behavior to the predictions of our models of the
world (e.g. self-fulfilling prophecies). According to Felix Geyer,
self-referentiallity in human systems (called also second-order cybernetics)
implies that a social system collects information about its functioning which
in turn may alter this very functioning. The outcome of such a process is,
however, unpredictable and may be recognized as a semiotic problem: what signs,
among many, are captured as information, and what is its societal
interpretation?
Obviously, the specific cognitive dimensions of social systems, namely bounded
rationality, perceptual bias that arise from a worldview, and
self-referentiallity add to the complexity of societies which may be really
different in kind (I refer here to Stan's remark that social complexity and
ecological complexity look like different applications, not kinds). There
appears simply to be more degrees of freedom in a social system which are also
qualitatively different from ecological.
Igor
Dr. Igor Matutinovic
Managing Director
GfK-Center for Market Research
Draskoviceva 54
100 00 Zagreb, Croatia
Tel: 385 1 48 96 222, 4921 222
Fax: 385 1 49 21 223
www.gfk.hr
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