Montage: Capturing Collective Identity through Multidisciplinary Modeling and Experimentation

Collective identities (CI) or more broadly, collective behaviors, are integral to society wherein individuals associate with a group that extends more broadly than to just themselves. Exemplars of such activity are political factions, civil unrest movements, labor unions, and organizational hierarchies. Collective identity can be realized through action. Actions may defy individual rational behavior for increased benefits for a given CI. In some cases, it is impossible to avoid collective behavior. For example, voters may align themselves with a candidate on a particular issue or a few issues of interest, but disagree on many others. The candidate and the associated survive due to selection during the election, but it is non-trivial to predict “what matters most” and the requisite survival probabilities. Making policy decisions or taking actions using models of these complex systems is non-trivial and very important for societal stability. In order to better understand the processes governing transition to and survival of collective identities, we need to evaluate the underlying processes of the system. To answer these complex questions, we propose to develop Montage, a suite of models, experimental tools, and theoretical treatments to evaluate such phenomena.