Nonlinear societal change: The perspective of dynamical systems

Abstract

Although rapid social change reflects each society's unique combination of myriad social, historical, political, and economic factors, we argue that the defining features of such change can be understood with recourse to the dynamic processes inherent in complex systems. Accordingly, we present a formal model that describes, in minimalist terms, the dynamics associated with rapid societal transitions in a society's norms and attitudes-and to the potential for rapid reversals of these transitions. The model predicts that societies in the midst of rapid change are characterized by dual realities corresponding to the new and the old, so that models focusing only on changes in the central tendency of a societal attitude provide a misleading account of rapid social change. This model is implemented in computer simulations and validated with empirical data concerning the transition in Eastern Europe from communism to democracy and a free market economy in the late 1980s.

Advancing the social psychology of rapid societal change

“…Whilst recognizing and conceptualizing the multilevel processes of societal change is one challenge – primarily a conceptual and descriptive challenge – incorporating them into analyses is quite another. Nowak and Vallacher () provide an analogy that illustrates the scope of this challenge. They suggest that societal changes are like phase transitions , like those that occur in physical systems.…”

“…A key aim of this special section, then, was to showcase some of the methodological opportunities in studying societal change, as well as addressing conceptual challenges. These opportunities include methods such as agent‐based modelling (Smith & Conrey, ) and how it can be applied to phenomena that are shaped at multiple levels of analysis and can be characterized by emergent outcomes such as societal transformations (Geschke, Lorenz, & Holtz, ; Nowak & Vallacher, ). Such an approach can provide insights into whether and when a qualitative transformation of a society is likely to occur, processes underlying the transformation, and the shape it is likely to take.…”

Computational Social Psychology

“…A. Nowak, de Raad, and Borkowski (2012) showed this to be the case in their computer simulation (see also DellaPosta, Shi, & Macy, 2015;Harton & Bullock, 2007, for a review).…”

Inclusion of People in Decision-Making

“…As Inglehart (2018: 78) briefly puts it, "basic cultural norms don't change immediately". Yet, societal conditions can unforeseeably create a bias that leads to reversals of majority opinion and to rapid and profound transformation (Nowak and Vallacher, 2018).…”