Understanding Evolutionary Societal Decision‐making for Sustainable Social Systems Engineering Purposes

Abstract

To engineer sustainable social systems for Earth's future, we need to understand how they change over time based on human decision‐making. The problem of the rise and fall (or overshoot and collapse) of cultures has been studied in the social sciences for centuries, so it is a useful pattern for this purpose. To understand this behavior pattern from an operational, social systems engineering perspective, this paper reviews two of the main simulation modeling approaches to this problem and finds them to be limited (from an operational perspective) by a basis in non‐human population dynamics that leads to a problematic dependence on initial conditions. We build upon this previous work, adapting it to include decision‐making and show how these decision‐making processes change the behavior over time. To demonstrate our process, we start with a recent model of Easter Island's collapse and add operational structures that allow human decision‐making to enter the modeling structure. We show how the addition of operational decision‐making structures provides a better fit to the anthropological data and how these structures were used to generate policy on the island of Tikopia. Finally, we argue that these decision‐making structures are, themselves, engineered objects that can be improved through better understanding of their evolutionary nature.