You can’t beat the system – unless you try

In 2008, during the great fall of the stock market, I was on my way to my university coffee shop. One of my colleagues, a graduate of an Ivy League university and an internationally recognized economist, met me and we started talking (how surprisingly) about the stock market and the failure of economic models to predict its chaotic behavior. “Everyone would like to predict whether a stock price is going to increase or decrease,” he said, “but unfortunately it is impossible. You cannot beat the system.”

As a researcher deeply interested in the psychology of human beings in their complex sociocultural context, I was not surprised by this pessimistic conclusion. Complex systems, specifically complex interactive psychocultural systems, are difficult to understand and to predict. The question is what constructive and optimistic vision we may provide for those who mess their hands while trying to understand these systems.