Emergent processes in group behavior

ABSTRACT—Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individ-ual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. Recent technological advances have provided us with unprecedented opportunities for conducting controlled laboratory experiments on human collective behavior. We describe two experimental paradigms in which we attempt to build predictive bridges between the beliefs, goals, and cognitive capacities of individuals andpatterns of behavior at the group level, showing how the members of a group dynamically allocate themselves to resources and how innovations diffuse through a social network. Agent-based computational models have provided useful explanator