As I stated in my previous posts, The Atlas of Social Complexity is comprised of several content themes.
The first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. This first theme includes six chapters, which I have so far blogged on. Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis. Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness. Chapter 9 explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness. Chapter 10 explores the complex multilevel dynamics of the Self. Chapter 11 is about human-machine intelligence.
The second major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is The Dynamics of Human Psychology. So far for this theme, I’ve given a basic overview, found here. I then moved on to the first theme, Human psychology as dynamical system (Chapter 13). From there I reviewed Chapter 14: Psychopathology of mental disorders ; Chapter 15: Healing and the therapeutic process; and Chapter 16: Mindfulness, imagination, and creativity.
The third major theme is living in social systems (Chapter 17), which was the focus of my previous post. The focus of this post is the first chapter in this theme, Chapter 18:
OVERVIEW OF COMPLEX SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Symbolic Interactionism. Herbert Blumer 1969. C.E.[1] Of the various fields of study we will tour for Theme 4, social psychology plays a crucial role as the theoretical and empirical link between the dynamics of human psychology and the macroscopic patterns of social systems. It is all about social interaction, socialisation, families, small groups, social networks, organisations, values and beliefs, deviance and stigma, the presentation of self and identity, social media – what is generally referred to as the microscopic and mesoscopic levels of daily social life and living in social systems. One can also think of these topics as the nuts and bolts of social systems.
The challenge, however, is that many of the topics in social psychology, particularly from a sociological perspective, are not central to the complexity sciences or the study of social complexity. This absence is beyond odd given that the entire project of generative social science[2] and the core concepts of self-organisation and emergence are grounded in the idea of interacting agents engaging one another at the microscopic level, giving rise to the macroscopic social systems in which the live.
Sometimes the obvious is staring us right in the face.
Fortunately, there are two fields of study addressing this absence.
But first an important point about how we approach social psychology.
Social psychology can be approached in two distinct ways:
Sociological social psychology (Soc-SP) and psychological social psychology (Psych-SP). While both examine the relationship between individuals and their social worlds, their focus differs significantly. Psych-SP emphasizes how social systems influence individual psychology, such as personality, identity, and beliefs, often adopting a person-centred and individualistic perspective. In contrast, Soc-SP centres on social interactions and systems, exploring how complex, symbolic interactions create social reality.
We advocate for the sociological approach, as it aligns with our commitment to understanding social complexity. Soc-SP highlights how personal struggles are often shared functions of broader systemic patterns, providing a foundation for studying collective behaviour, intersectionality, and resilience in socio-ecological systems. This interaction-centred perspective, rooted in traditions like symbolic interactionism and social constructionism, is vital for advancing computational social science and modelling methodologies, even as it remains underrepresented in the broader social and computational sciences.
With that clarification in order, the two fields we explore are:
Dynamical social psychology:
This field is an extension of the dynamical systems theory approach to human psychology outlined in Theme 2. The two most prominent figures in dynamical social psychology are Andrzej Nowak and Robin Vallacher.
Computational social science (i.e., social simulation):
While dynamical social psychology is mostly about applying complexity science to its topics of interest, which gives the field its narrowness in interest; computational social science, at least in its current form, is very much grounded in the social science turn, and is really about using computational tools to assist the study of various social science topics. Also, given the nature of many of the techniques in the field, there is a tendency toward the microscopic and mesoscopic; that is, the social psychological. For those new to the field, suggest spending time exploring the Journal of Artificial Societies and SocialSimulation, founded by Nigel Gilbert, the British sociologist, complexity scientist and leading figure in complex policy evaluation, agent-based modelling and social simulation.
KEY WORDS: Complex social psychology, computational social science, social simulation, dynamical systems theory, sociological social psychology, agency and structure.
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