Modeling the influence of narratives on collective behavior
This paper considers the problem of understanding the influences of narratives or stories on individual and group behavior. Narrative theory describes how stories help people make sense of the world, and is being used to explain behavior in domains such as security, health care, and consumer behavio...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
© The System Dynamics Society,
2022-04-07T18:48:42Z.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get fulltext |
| Summary: | This paper considers the problem of understanding the influences of narratives or stories on individual and group behavior. Narrative theory describes how stories help people make sense of the world, and is being used to explain behavior in domains such as security, health care, and consumer behavior. We are interested in using narrative theory to develop better predictions of behavior and have developed a multi-methodology approach to combine narrative influence with system dynamics modeling of group behavior. Our model quantifies how individuals use narratives to understand current events and make decisions. We model the time-varying strength of cultural narratives as a degree of belief in the narrative's explanatory power, updated heuristically in response to observations about similarity between cultural narratives and current events. We use Twitter posts to measure narrative-significant observations in the real world. Using this approach, we investigate a case study of the violent riots in London in 2011 and demonstrate how relevant narratives can be identified, monitored, and included in behavior models to predict violent activity. This material is based on work supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, Grant No. N00014-09-1-0597. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations therein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research. |
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