Psychological research and application in autonomous networks and systems: A new interesting field

One of fundamental principles in autonomous networks and systems is to “accommodate participants' rational behaviors, and design for choice”. Autonomous networks and systems are composed, used, and even manipulated by end-users, thus, naturally usage psychology will affect the networking behavior and performance. We argue that, through determining consumer preference (or evaluation of certain resource), psychological factors could have effect on the evolution of autonomous networks and systems with direct and indirect ways: consumer preference can directly affect the diffusion of virus, information and behaviors in autonomous networks, and facilitate to design the easy-to-use and non-intrusive interfaces between human and computers; on the other hand, the indirect way lies in that: consumer preference change will have influence on related economic theories, which, in turn, affects many economically-inspired networking researches and applications. Our contribution lies in the following aspects: firstly, we introduce the conceptual model of consumer behavior from psychology, which is an important determinant leading to users' choice. Then, we provide several examples about psychologically-inspired research and application: social comparison based incentive mechanism, trust evaluation scheme based on spreading activation model, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) design in mobile social networks, and prospect theory based incentive mechanism. We argue that, as a new and interesting field about cross-discipline research, psychologically-inspired networking could help to identify social-technical challenges, inspire potentially interesting applications, and suggest important research opportunities.