Micromotives is a blog about the science and art of human decision making — how people make decisions about the world around them, and the situations in which those decisions are accurate or inaccurate, with a special focus on decision making in the markets and business. This is a broad multidisciplinary subject, and prospective topics include probability, statistics, cognitive and evolutionary psychology, epistemology, sociology, economics, and information visualization and design. I hope you’ll join me as I explore these fascinating issues.

The expression micromotives comes from Thomas Schelling’s landmark 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehavior. Schelling uses the term to describe the collection of personal motivations, desires, perceptions, and decisions which comprise each person’s unique behavior pattern. He contrasts this with macrobehavior, which is the collective group dynamics we see when individuals with their own micromotives interact.

What this book is about is a kind of analysis that is characteristic of a large part of the social sciences, especially the more theoretical part. That kind of analysis explores the relation between the behavior characteristics of the individuals who comprise some social aggregate, and the characteristics of the aggregate.

Schelling goes on to document the many ways in which people’s individual behaviors can interact with one another’s to create surprising and non-intuitive group behaviors.

These situations, in which people’s behavior or people’s choices depend on the behavior or choices of other people, are the ones that usually don’t permit any simple summation or extrapolation to the aggregates. To make that connection we usually have to look at the system of interaction between individuals and their environment, that is, between individuals and other individuals or between individuals and the collectivity.

I’ll be posting much more about Schelling and his conception of micromotives and macrobehavior in the future.