Sun-Ki Chai

Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction

In the context of modernization and development, the complex adaptive systems framework can help address the coupling of macro social constraint and opportunity with individual agency. Combining system dynamics and agent based modeling, we formalize the Human Development (HD) perspective with a system of asymmetric, coupled nonlinear equations empirically validated from World Values Survey (WVS) data, capturing the core qualitative logic of HD theory. Using a simple evolutionary game approach, we fuse endogenously derived individual socio-economic attribute changes with Prisoner’s Dilemma spatial intra-societal economic transactions. We then explore a new human development dynamics (HDD) model behavior via quasi-global simulation methods to explore economic development, cultural plasticity, social and political change.

Confucian Capitalism and the Paradox of Closure and Structural Holes in East Asian Firms

A long-standing debate has taken place in the organizational sociology and social network literatures about the relative advantages of network closure versus structural holes in the generation of social capital. There is recent evidence that these advantages differ across cultures and between East Asia and the West in particular, but existing network models are unable to explain why or address cultural variation in general. This paper seeks to provide a solution by integrating a culture-embedded rational model of action into the social network model of structure, using this not only to re-examine the closure versus structural hole debate, but also to tie it to the literature on Confucian capitalism and the ‘East Asian Model’ of the firm. We argue that this integrated approach allows us to systematically analyse the relationship between culture and behaviour in networks and, more specifically, to explain why closure has been a more powerful source of productivity in East Asia than the West.

Real-World behavior analysis through a social media lens

The advent of participatory web has enabled information consumers to become information producers via social media. This phenomenon has attracted researchers of different disciplines including social scientists, political parties, and market researchers to study social media as a source of data to explain human behavior in the physical world. Could the traditional approaches of studying social behaviors such as surveys be complemented by computational studies that use massive user-generated data in social media? In this paper, using a large amount of data collected from Twitter, the blogosphere, social networks, and news sources, we perform preliminary research to investigate if human behavior in the real world can be understood by analyzing social media data. The goals of this research is twofold: (1) determining the relative effectiveness of a social media lens in analyzing and predicting real-world collective behavior, and (2) exploring the domains and situations under which social media can be a predictor for real-worlds behavior. We develop a four-step model: community selection, data collection, online behavior analysis, and behavior prediction. The results of this study show that in most cases social media is a good tool for estimating attitudes and further research is needed for predicting social behavior.

Cultural Comparisons of Beliefs and Values: Applying the Grid-Group Approach to the World Values Survey

The goal of our research is to enrich quantitative cross-cultural studies by employing concepts of grid and group, which were first developed within anthropology and more recently deployed in a broader range of social sciences. The grid-group approach has until now not been subjected to large-scale quantitative empirical investigation, thus limiting its use in cross-cultural research. In order to carry out such an investigation, we develop individual-level indices for measuring grid and group, using data from the World Values Survey, and then investigate the collective or cohort level by taking a country or a city as a main cohort proxy and make comparisons across different cultures. We establish a number of results that suggest the usefulness of grid and group in quantitative studies: (a) grid and group variables exhibit significantly less variance within societies than between societies, (b) the characterizations of societies derived from the indices coincide with findings in the ethnographic literature, and (c) grid and group are statistically related to a society’s socioeconomic conditions and geographic location. We hope our results will further stimulate the formulation of empirically testable propositions using cultural indices. This article examines cultural differences across countries by using the grid-group framework. The grid-group framework is a well-known cultural representation framework in cultural anthropology. It is a typology of social environments created by anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970, 1982) that has been adapted, modifi ed, and

Endogenous Ideology Formation and Economic Policy in Former Colonies

Social science is full of studies that purport to recommend optimal economic policies for states to pursue. However, this wealth of analysis is not matched by works that attempt to explain the policy choices that states actually make and the reasons for those choices. Positive, deductive analysis of economic policy formation is still a relatively new research area. Theories that attempt to predict variations in economic strategies among countries are rare, and those that apply to both developing and developed countries are rarer still. Given the obvious centrality of the issue, the lack of systematic, general explanations for such variations creates a rather gaping hole in the literature on political economy. This shortage of explanations is quite obvious for perhaps the most prominent variable in economic policy choice, the level of state intervention in the economy. Intervention can be measured along two major dimensions: the first is the extent to which tariffs, quotas, licenses, subsidies, and other forms of economic control distort overall prices of goods from their free-market value; the second is the size of government spending with respect to the total size of the economy. 1 The level of state economic intervention has long been considered the most salient variable in public perceptions of economic policy, 2 and is the most widely examined policy variable in the comparative analysis of economic performance. 3 Furthermore, state economic intervention is the central policy variable in the great ideological debate of this century, that between capitalism and socialism. This article examines a number of different existing explanations for variations in levels of state economic intervention and argues that they ignore the crucial role that ideology plays in economic policy formation. It then provides a theory of endogenous ‘‘oppositional’’ ideology formation among groups engaged in conflict against the state, applying it to explain systematic biases among state elites in former

Rational Choice Theory: A Forum for Exchange of Ideas between the Hard and Social Sciences in Predictive Behavioral Modeling

The rational choice model of human behavior provides general assumptions that underlie most of the predictive behavioral modeling done in the social sciences. Surprisingly, despite its origins in the work of eminent mathematicians and computer scientists and its current prominence in the social sciences, there has been relatively little interest among hard scientists in incorporating rational choice assumptions into their agent-based analysis of behavior. It is argued here that doing so will introduce greater theoretical generality into agent-based models, and will also provide hard scientists an opportunity to contribute solutions to known weaknesses in the conventional version of rational choice. This in turn will invigorate the dialogue between social scientists and hard scientists studying social phenomena.