Title: Social experience as embodied interactivity, cascading across but also within organisms
Abstract
Social experience is an embodied coordination amongst multiple organisms in a shared context. Whether within or across bodies, this coordination unfolds as a cascade, exhibiting nonlinear interactions across multiple nested spatial and temporal scales. Theoretically, cross-scale interactions align with the intersectionality of social constructs and identity. Practically, multifractal descriptors of cascade-driven nonlinearity predict psychological outcomes in how we relate to our context. Network modeling is effective for detailing the interactivity of qualitatively different, observer-coded behaviors when that context spans a group of actors. However, network modeling shows that even single bodies enact group-like coordinations: bodily degrees of freedom share and exchange multifractal nonlinearity in support of a perceptual/cognitive task. After all, social interactions are not simply the trading of qualitatively different behaviors in a linear framework where effects are sums of constituent parts. Their support for the growth and emergence of new social symbols/constructs (e.g., gender) suggests a deeper wellspring of nonlinearly creative tensions. Network models populated with multifractal descriptors of more continuously measured movement could light the way to some fascinating possibilities. For instance, the diversity and fluidity of socially constructed experience could rest more deeply on the multi-body extension of cascades in single-body movement.
Before the meeting, please read this paper:
Eason, E. G., Carver, N. S., Kelty-Stephen, D. G., & Fausto-Sterling, A. (2020). Using Vector Autoregression Modeling to Reveal Bidirectional Relationships in Gender/Sex-Related Interactions in Mother-Infant Dyads. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 1507. DOI: fpsyg.2020.01507
For further reading, please see:
- Kelty-Stephen, DG. (2017). Threading a multifractal social psychology through within-organism coordination to within-group interactions: A tale of coordination in three acts. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 104, p. 363-370. DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2017.08.037.
LINK: [Science Direct] - Bloomfield, L., Lane, E., Mangalam, M. & Kelty-Stephen, DG. (2021). Perceiving and remembering speech depend on multifractal nonlinearity in movements producing and exploring speech. Journal of The Royal Society Interface. DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2021.0272
- Booth, Ch.R., Brown, H.L., Eason, EG., Wallot, S. & Kelty-Stephen, DG. (2018). Expectations on Hierarchical Scales of Discourse: Multifractality Predicts Both Short- and Long-Range Effects of Violating Gender Expectations in Text Reading, Discourse Processes, 55:1, 12-30. DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2016.1197811
18/03/2022, 3:30 pm (GMT+1, Warsaw) / 10:30 am (GMT-4, NYC – due to Daylight Saving Time!)
Online meeting (via Zoom): click here to join the meeting
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952324.