Computer-aided Visualization of Psycho-social Structures

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Paper presented at a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(139th Meeting, Philadelphia, December 1971): Value and Knowledge Requirements for Peace [PDF version]

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Introduction

In this paper the problem of peace is considered to be an ecological problem. Ecology is the study of the complex interrelationships between organisms and their environments. To clarify this approach, three major types of social complexity -- organizational, problem and conceptual -- are briefly reviewed together with their interactions and their effect on the individual. A practical approach to handling, generating, and facilitating comprehension of this complexity by the use of interactive computer graphics is then described in terms of its significance for a variety of users.

It is not the intention of this paper to suggest a new theoretical model to examine the problems of peace but rather to show the relevance of an existing device to many such enquiries. In demonstrating this relevance, it was useful to treat peace as an ecological problem because of the high tolerance of the ecological approach to complexity of the order detected in the psycho-social system. The closing sections comment on the relevance of this approach to value and knowledge requirements for peace and suggest some practical stepswhich could be taken.