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Social-Behavioral (SB) Modeling Is Famously Hard but Has Great Potential

• For SB modeling to achieve its potential, great advances are needed in understanding the states of complex adaptive systems and recognizing when interventions are and are not controllable.
• Many SB issues are so-called wicked problems with no a priori solutions. If they are found at all, solutions must emerge from human interactions.
• The very nature of social systems is structurally dynamic, so structure changes may emerge after interactions and events, which complicates modeling.
• Obstacles to progress include disciplinary norms, mindsets, and some discrete scientific challenges, including out-of-kilter relationships among theory development, empiricism, and computational exploration.
• Another obstacle is the need to rethink how social-behavioral models can be best used to aid decisionmaking. Given inherent uncertainties, emphasis should change from efforts to predict outcomes toward efforts to anticipate and understand possible outcomes and ways to improve the likelihood of desirable outcomes (perhaps with adaptations). This will include understanding when interventions are likely to be uncontrollable and perhaps counterproductive.

This report summarizes priority challenges for social-behavioral modeling, which has not yet begun to reach its full potential. Some of the obstacles reflect inherent challenges: Social systems are complex adaptive systems; they often pose "wicked problems," and even the structure of social systems shows emergent behavior. Other obstacles reflect disciplinary norms and practices, mindsets, and numerous scientific and methodological challenges. We discuss challenges in six groups:

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Difficulties, Challenges, and a Broad Strategy for Next Steps

• Chapter Three

  Broad Strategy for Next Steps

• Chapter Four

  Tightening the Theory-Modeling-Experimentation Research Cycle

• Chapter Five

  Theory and Its Modeling

• Chapter Six

  Experimentation

• Chapter Seven

  Modernizing Model-Based Decision Aiding

• Chapter Eight

  Methods and Technology

• Chapter Nine

  Infrastructure, Culture, and Governance

• Appendix A

  Social and Behavioral Modeling Laboratories

• Appendix B

  Definitions

• Appendix C

  Validation

• Appendix D

  Participants in Workshops