Introduction: social-cognitive complexity,computational models and theoretical frames

摘要

The usage of formal models, i.e. computational and/or mathematical ones, for the analysis of social-cognitive complexity is by no means a fundamentally new approach. For a rather long time such models have been developed and applied to different problems of the social and cognitive sciences; quite informative impressions about different methodical approaches and results can be looked up, e.g., in Polk and Seifert (2002) for the cognitive sciences and in Nowak (2009) for the social sciences. One can learn from these and other overviews that the domain of modeling social and cognitive phenomena in a precise way is meanwhile a well-established field of research.