From Philip Ball
In berating my book Critical Mass, Steve Fuller argues that “social physics” can never reveal the complex decision-making processes of real people (4 June, p 21). I agree, which is why I say as much several times in the book.
Fuller misses my point spectacularly. Even an “interloping chemist” (physicist actually, but that is probably even worse) knows that a key aim of social science is to understand social phenomena. Some of these are at the mercy of individuals’ psychology. But others appear to be shaped primarily by the pattern of interactions between people and the constraints within which they operate, more or less regardless of how they make up their minds.
For example, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico recently showed that they could reproduce the complex dynamics of economic markets on the assumption that market traders have “zero intelligence”. This does not mean that traders do have zero intelligence (perish the thought). Rather, it means market dynamics depend not on the complexities of how traders plan their strategies, but on the way the rules and structures are set up.
Fortunately Fuller’s position, with its bizarre rejection of statistics and modelling and its disregard of any social phenomena that depend more on interactions than on the depths of the human psyche, is not the mainstream one in the social sciences. But it is troubling nonetheless to find at least one social scientist fixated on the psychology of the individual at the expense of any concern about how society works. Or perhaps Fuller believes (he would not be the first) that there is no such thing as society?
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From Michael Edelman
Fuller complains that humans are far too complex to be treated statistically. And yet macroeconomics does that very successfully, constructing aggregate models of human behaviour that have helped us to understand individual (microeconomic) behaviour as well. Economists have profitably mined physics and engineering for models of fluid dynamics and other physical phenomena which neatly describe group behaviours.
Sociologists have been tremendously productive in the generation of hypotheses regarding human behaviour, but remarkably unsuccessful in constructing predictive models of behaviour when compared with economists or, for that matter, psychologists. Perhaps sociologists need more, and not less, mathematics in their approach.
Huntington Woods, Michigan, US
London, UK
