Understanding Interactions in Complex Systems: Toward a Science of Interaction

Abstract

Since human activities are embedded in interactions, they are at the very center of the modeling of any form of social life, shaping societies, groups and interpersonal relationships. All theories of social, cognitive and cultural life are thus associated with explicit or tacit models of the nature of interactions and relations. This book proposes a multifaceted exploration of the complex nature of interactions, and of the modeling of complex interactional systems. It shows that all disciplines can be enriched by exploring alternative paradigms in the modeling of interactions, and that if discipline-bound studies tend to underestimate the multi-dimensional nature of interactions, ignoring it is not an option.It will be of great interest for anyone involved in disciplines such as economics, geography, linguistics, communication studies, education sciences and sociology, and in fields such as the study of networks, interactional systems, relations between agents, and mathematical and computational modeling.