Abstract
Human cognition is diachronic in that concerted bodily activity links behavior to values that co-evolve with socio-culture: slow historical processes become interlaced with interaction. In principle, therefore, diachronic processes can be placed at the heart of a future socio-cognitive science. In showing how this can be done, we use evidence regarding the historical persistence of Cosa Nostra. In Sicily, the slow processes of a cultural ecosystem, self-maintaining practices, prompt agents to self-configure and make decisions that sustain the mafia. Culture is insinuated into cognitively complex agents who rely on immergence. Having explored how Cosa Nostra self-maintained, we offer a methodology for studying such processes. Agent-based simulation serves to pursue how time-scales are integrated, behavioral patterns sedimented and the effects these have on decision making. Accordingly, we offer a model of cognitively complex agents: these self-configure beliefs, intentions, and desires as they engage with social organizations whose rewards demand impersonal conformity. For Cosa Nostra to survive, the ecosystemic power of values like omertà must be sustained as self-configured agents decide how to act. We conclude that effective socio-cognitive modeling offers much to the field of organizational cognition and, above all, the study and management of organizational change.
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Notes
- 1.
Cowley (2014) highlights the question of how people use impersonal experience in terms of what he terms the integration problem. In illustration, he describes how one person solves the river problem by moving back and forth between more personal and impersonal modes or acting.
- 2.
Studies in legal companies revealed that trust is an essential component in work performance (Colquitt et al., 2012). However, these studies take the existence of the organization and roles such as supervisor and subordinate (which can be attributed to a social system) as given and investigate, e.g., the effect of justice on trust (which can be attributed to a human system). In contrast, in the covert organization the concepts of organizational memory and roles are an abstraction from enacted relationships. The concept of trust is fundamental for concepts such as roles.
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Neumann, M., Cowley, S.J. (2016). Modeling Social Agency Using Diachronic Cognition: Learning from the Mafia. In: Secchi, D., Neumann, M. (eds) Agent-Based Simulation of Organizational Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18153-0_14
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