Yes, group formation is complicated, but that is sidestepping the question.
The issue is: What happenings are people responding to when they believe themselves to be members of a group, and what happenings are the members of the group responding to when they believe someone else to now be a member. Certainly there will be variation, but despite that variability there will also be a high rate of predictability. There is a whole science (that I am not immersed in) on group membership and group formation. It is a simple problem that is difficult to solve because of the complexity. It would be interesting to start brainstorming a simulation. A simple netlogo program could be constructed, group membership could be a trait of the individual. Group membership could be changed by a combination of self-traits ("desire", etc.) and circumstance ("acceptance by those around you", etc.). There could even be room for an individual to "feel" they are part of a group when many members of the group feel otherwise. The goal would be to determine how environmental variables (especially variables we might have a shot of manipulating in real life) effect the groups individuals feel they are a part of. Of course, as with any agent based modeling situation, one big challenge would be constructing a simulation has flexibility to surprise us with its results (i.e., one that doesn't just do exactly what we intentionally programmed it to do). Eric On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 12:02 AM, Carl Tollander <c...@plektyx.com> wrote: > Group membership is not necessarily self-selecting. Perceiving group identity, deciding to be part of the group, working to be accepted into the group, and having the group 'accept' a member are different activities, and of course there are multiple groups with competing, occasionally dynamic membership criteria and membership itself is fuzzy. > > On 10/27/11 8:32 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote: > >Gillian, > Hmmmm.... trying to put my evolutionary psychology hat on, and feeling like I am not doing it quite as well as I should.... > > Humans ARE "programed" to do things for the good of their groups. The question then is: How do we get people to feel as if they are part of a group? and How do we get people to expand the size of the group they feel they are part of? One subsection of those questions, a small, but not insignificant part, is wondering: How do we get advantaged people to include the disadvantaged as part of 'their' group? > > Ultimately, if we had the right knowledge, this would be a perfect problem to tackle with agent based modeling. If we knew what types of experiences people needed to feel as if they were part of a group, and we knew what types of experiences were needed to expand felt-group size, then we start designing various worlds along various principles to see which produce the best outcome. The complexity will be too high to solve the problem any other way. > > Alas... what are the factors? > > Eric > >
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