Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What is computational cultural psychology?
- 2 The digital psychologist: information technology and cultural psychology
- 3 Why don’t primates have God? Language and the abstraction of thought
- 4 Lost in translation: how to use automatic translation machines for understanding “otherness”
- 5 Spies and metaphors: automatic identification of metaphors for strategic intelligence
- 6 Scent of a woman: the mediation of smell and automatic analysis of extended senses
- 7 Dolly Parton’s love lexicon: detection of motifs in cultural texts
- 8 The relational matrix of the I
- 9 Identifying themes: from the Wingfield family to Harry and Sally
- 10 Eating and dining: studying the dynamics of dinner
- 11 Getting even: the cultural psychology of revenge and what computers can do about it
- Epilogue: on generals and mail coach drivers
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
2 - The digital psychologist: information technology and cultural psychology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What is computational cultural psychology?
- 2 The digital psychologist: information technology and cultural psychology
- 3 Why don’t primates have God? Language and the abstraction of thought
- 4 Lost in translation: how to use automatic translation machines for understanding “otherness”
- 5 Spies and metaphors: automatic identification of metaphors for strategic intelligence
- 6 Scent of a woman: the mediation of smell and automatic analysis of extended senses
- 7 Dolly Parton’s love lexicon: detection of motifs in cultural texts
- 8 The relational matrix of the I
- 9 Identifying themes: from the Wingfield family to Harry and Sally
- 10 Eating and dining: studying the dynamics of dinner
- 11 Getting even: the cultural psychology of revenge and what computers can do about it
- Epilogue: on generals and mail coach drivers
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
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.
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- Information
- Introduction to Computational Cultural Psychology , pp. 16 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014