Lessons on Decision Aiding for Social-Behavioral Modeling

This chapter draws on lessons from other domains to suggest ways for social-behavioral modeling to be useful in aiding high-level decision-making on both national security and social-policy issues. Analysis to aid such decision-making often requires addressing issues from a system perspective, providing both a broad, low-resolution view and selected high-resolution views, confronting deep uncertainty, and finding strategies that are flexible to changes of mission or objective, adaptive to circumstances, and robust to events to the extent feasible with available resources. Such analysis needs to draw on a portfolio of methods and tools. The chapter discusses implications for the nature of social-behavioral modeling.