Abstract
A group of individuals is considered in which each individual has tendencies to exhibit one or another of two mutually exclusive behaviors. Neurobiophysically this may be described in terms of Landahl's reciprocally inhibited parallel reaction chains. The spontaneous excitations ε1 and ε2 at the central connections of each chain are a measure of the “natural” tendency of the individual toward one or the other of the two behaviors. According to equations derived by H. D. Landahl, the probability of one or the other behavior is determined by the difference ε1 − ε2. A population of individuals is considered in which ε1 − ε2 is distributed in some continuous way, and therefore in which the probability of a given behavior is distributed continuously between 0 and 1. The effect of other individuals exhibiting a given behavior is to increase the corresponding ε of the individual. Thus behavior of others affects the probability for a given behavior of each individual. It is shown that the equations describing the behavior of the population on the basis of this neurobiophysical picture reduce in the first approximation to the differential equations which were postulated by the author in his previous work on social behavior.
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Literature
Rashevsky, N. 1948a.Mathematical Theory of Human Relations. Bloomington: The Principia Press.
Rashevsky, N. 1948b.Mathematical Biophysics. Revised Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rashevsky, N. 1949. “Mathematical Biology of Social Behavior: I.”Bull. Math. Biophysics,11, 105–113.
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Rashevsky, N. Mathematical biological of social behavior: II. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 11, 157–163 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478361
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478361