Andrzej K. Nowak - Target in Control: Social Influence as Distributed Information Processing

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Traditionally, the theories and methods of the social sciences and humanitiesthe so-called soft scienceswere believed to be irreconcilable with the perspective and methods of physics, chemistry, and the like, the so-called hard sciences (Snow 1959). The bridging of these distinct domains of inquiry within a single conceptual framework in recent years counts as one of the greatest achievements of the complexity perspective. Theoretical concepts, analytical tools, and research methods that originated in physics, mathematics, and computer science, including such notions as emergence (e.g., Holland 2000), self-organization (e.g., Ulrich and Probst 2012), complex networks (e.g., Watts and Strogatz 1998; Albert and Barabsi 2002; Strogatz 2001), complex systems (e.g., Sawyer and Sawyer 2005), dynamical systems (e.g., Nowak and Vallacher 1998; Vallacher and Nowak; Devaney 2008), and agent-based modeling (e.g., Davidsson 2002; Gilbert 2004), have revolutionized psychology, the social science, and the humanities.