Behavioral science最新文献

A mathematical model of feedback-controlled behavior is developed using minimal assumptions about the nature of the leader-follower system. The essential element is that the system is linked through consistent feedback based on the follower's behavior. The model shows that the follower can exhibit convergent, periodic or chaotic patterns of behavior. If the leader's feedback is based on an incentive function that varies strongly with output, or if the follower strongly discounts the leader's feedback, then the follower's behavior may not be predictable. Thus, seemingly random behavior can result from entirely consistent, deterministic conditions. This conclusion applies equally well to cases where the leader and the follower are singular or aggregate entities such as biological or social systems. The behavioral pattern that is exhibited depends on the value of a single constant, which is the product of the follower's reactivity to incentives and the leader's incentive change rate. The fact that a single constant can be used to differentiate between fundamentally different forms of behavior is important to the study of leadership.

Mild, delimited, and adaptive depression may be a specific example of a more general class of mechanism by which intelligent systems--individual, social, and artificial--adapt to dynamic, uncertain, and dangerous environments. Computer modeling, based on connectionist and artificial intelligence planning and learning programming techniques, supports this hypothesis by generating both adaptive behavior and analogs for 10 phenomena associated with depression: global, stable, and internal failure explantation, a cognitive loop of failure rumination, decreased motivation, self-esteem, and self-efficacy, and increased realism, negative generalization, and cognitive change. The idea of adaptive depression can be applied to more than one level of living systems. A better understanding of normal and adaptive depression may lead to a better understanding of clinical depression.

This sociological simulation uses the ideas of semiotics and symbolic interactionism to demonstrate how an appropriately developed associative memory in the minds of individuals on the microlevel can self-organize into macrolevel dissipative structures of societies such as racial cultural/economic classes, status symbols and fads. The associative memory used is based on an extension of the IAC neural network (the Interactive Activation and Competition network). Several IAC networks act together to form a society by virtue of their human-like properties of intuition and creativity. These properties give them the ability to create and understand signs, which lead to the macrolevel structures of society. This system is implemented in hierarchical object oriented container classes which facilitate change in deep structure. Graphs of general trends and an historical account of a simulation run of this dynamical system are presented.

Independent practice association (IPA) model health maintenance organizations (HMO's) represent one of the fastest growing segments of managed care in the United States. IPA's have unique organizational characteristics which thwart efforts to function as a unified whole, particularly where quality of care programs are concerned. Living systems theory was employed as a method to identify subsystems and critical processes within an IPA model HMO in rural California. The application of living systems theory in this way provided insights into the quality of care program within the IPA, which could eventually lead to a redesign of critical processes within the entire system.

This paper contains a report from a study of how individual humans exploit their competence in group work during a workshop. The intention of the study was to know how well groups of workshop participants would apply to the theories of living systems and of organization science about gatekeepers and the organizational structure mentioned by H. Minzberg (Minzberg 1983). The workshop population characteristics and its program procedure are described. A method for the study is created. The method builds on a graphical model of living systems theory. An attempt to test the method is carried out by studying the behavior of workshop groups.