A Nonlinear Dynamic Model of Social Interaction

This article presents a dynamic model of dyadic social interaction. It is shown that a set of simple deterministic arithmetic operations representing basic assumptions about social-involvement behavior can lead to a variety of complex outcomes, including asymptotically stable behavior, self-sustaining periodic behavior, and chaotic behavior. These outcomes illustrate the emergence of macroscopic interaction-level properties from microscopic individual-level rules. © 1991, Sage. All rights reserved