Models Are Stupid, and We Need More of Them

Despite numerous efforts extoling the virtues of formal modeling (Epstein 2008; Schank 2001; Smith & Conrey 2007; Marewksi & Olsson 2009; Farrell & Lewandowsky 2010; Weinhardt & Vancouver 2012; Smaldino et al. 2015), there remains widespread resistance among social and behavioral scientists to adopt formal modeling in their general research approach. In addition to the technical challenge posed by the mathematical and programming skills required to understand and develop models, a common point of resistance appears to stem from the perception of models as crude, overly simplistic, and unrealistic. The conclusion is that models are largely useless as anything but a formal exercise, and unnecessary for most scientists to engage with.

[1]  K. Popper,et al.  Conjectures and Refutations , 1963 .

[2]  Stuart A. Kauffman.  Articulation of Parts Explanation in Biology and the Rational Search for Them , 1970 .

[3]  L. Luckinbill,et al.  Coexistence in Laboratory Populations of Paramecium Aurelia and Its Predator Didinium Nasutum , 1973 .

[4]  D. Campbell.  ‘Downward Causation’ in Hierarchically Organised Biological Systems , 1974 .

[5]  R. Sibly.  Optimal group size is unstable , 1983, Animal Behaviour.

[6]  J J Hopfield,et al.  Neurons with graded response have collective computational properties like those of two-state neurons. , 1984, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[7]  E. Eisenberg.  Ambiguity as strategy in organizational communication , 1984 .

[8]  V. Braitenberg.  Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology , 1984 .

[9]  A Storr.  Isaac Newton. , 1985, British medical journal.

[10]  M. Brewer.  The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time , 1991 .

[11]  Alan A. Berryman,et al.  The Orgins and Evolution of Predator‐Prey Theory , 1992 .

[12]  B A Huberman,et al.  Evolutionary games and computer simulations. , 1993, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[13]  Mitchel Resnick,et al.  Turtles, termites, and traffic jams - explorations in massively parallel microworlds , 1994 .

[14]  T. Valente.  Social network thresholds in the diffusion of innovations , 1996 .

[15]  Gerd Gigerenzer,et al.  Surrogates for Theories , 1998 .

[16]  Mark A. Bedau,et al.  Can Unrealistic Computer Models Illuminate Theoretical Biology , 1999 .

[17]  John J. Hopfield,et al.  Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities , 1999 .

[18]  Jeffrey C. Schank,et al.  Beyond reductionism: Refocusing on the individual with individual-based modeling , 2001, Complex..

[19]  E. Rogers,et al.  Diffusion of innovations , 1964, Encyclopedia of Sport Management.

[20]  H. Blum.  Complexity and organization , 2004, Synthese.

[21]  Frank M. Bass,et al.  A New Product Growth for Model Consumer Durables , 2004, Manag. Sci..

[22]  Frank M. Bass,et al.  Comments on "A New Product Growth for Model Consumer Durables The Bass Model" , 2004, Manag. Sci..

[23]  N. Tinbergen.  On aims and methods of Ethology , 2010 .

[24]  David Lazer,et al.  The Network Structure of Exploration and Exploitation , 2007 .

[25]  Eliot R. Smith,et al.  Agent-Based Modeling: A New Approach for Theory Building in Social Psychology , 2007, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[26]  Jeffrey C Schank,et al.  The development of locomotor kinematics in neonatal rats: an agent-based modeling analysis in group and individual contexts. , 2008, Journal of theoretical biology.

[27]  Chip Heath,et al.  Who Drives Divergence? Identity-Signaling, Outgroup Dissimilarity, and the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes , 2008, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[28]  J. Brooks.  Why most published research findings are false: Ioannidis JP, Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Ioannina, Greece , 2008 .

[29]  Julian N. Marewski,et al.  Beyond the null ritual : Formal modeling of psychological processes , 2009 .

[30]  S. Lewandowsky,et al.  Computational Models as Aids to Better Reasoning in Psychology , 2010 .

[31]  M. Brewer,et al.  Chapter 2 - Optimal Distinctiveness Theory: A Framework for Social Identity, Social Cognition, and Intergroup Relations , 2010 .

[32]  Dirk Helbing,et al.  How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters , 2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[33]  Justin M. Weinhardt,et al.  Computational models and organizational psychology: Opportunities abound , 2012 .

[34]  Jeffrey C. Schank,et al.  An Agent-Based Model of Social Identity Dynamics , 2012, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[35]  Ryan Muldoon,et al.  Segregation That No One Seeks* , 2012, Philosophy of Science.

[36]  Thomas T. Hills,et al.  Optimal foraging in semantic memory. , 2012, Psychological review.

[37]  Andrzej Nowak,et al.  Why Simulate? To Develop a Mental Model , 2013, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[38]  Mina Bissell,et al.  Reproducibility: The risks of the replication drive , 2013, Nature.

[39]  W. Wimsatt,et al.  Developing scaffolds in evolution, culture, and cognition , 2013 .

[40]  Christopher J. May,et al.  Models as scaffolds for understanding. , 2014 .

[41]  Jeremy Gunawardena,et al.  Models in biology: ‘accurate descriptions of our pathetic thinking’ , 2014, BMC Biology.

[42]  Neil Malhotra,et al.  Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer , 2014, Science.

[43]  O. Wolkenhauer.  Why model? , 2013, Front. Physiol..

[44]  Simone Schnall,et al.  Clean Data: Statistical Artefacts Wash Out Replication Efforts , 2014 .

[45]  Daniel Kahneman,et al.  A new etiquette for replication. , 2014 .

[46]  Paul E. Smaldino,et al.  Social conformity despite individual preferences for distinctiveness , 2014, Royal Society Open Science.

[47]  P. Smaldino,et al.  Theory development with agent-based models , 2015 .

[48]  R. Thaler.  Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics , 2015 .

[49]  Paul E. Smaldino,et al.  Replication, Communication, and the Population Dynamics of Scientific Discovery , 2015, PloS one.

[50]  P. Smaldino.  The Evolution of the Social Self: Multidimensionality of Social Identity Solves the Coordination Problems of a Society , 2015 .

[51]  Michael C. Frank,et al.  Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science , 2015, Science.

[52]  Richard McElreath.  Statistical rethinking: A bayesian course with R examples , 2015 .

[53]  Celia B. Harris,et al.  The hows and whys of “we” (and “I”) in groups , 2015, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[54]  Geoffrey J. Leonardelli,et al.  Optimal Distinctiveness Theory : A Framework for Social Identity , Social Cognition , and Intergroup Relations , 2016 .

[55]  Jonathan Touboul,et al.  The hipster effect: When anti-conformists all look the same , 2014, Discrete & Continuous Dynamical Systems - B.