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Advancing Experimental Research within the Social Sciences and the Study of Culture

About HCXC

The University of Hawai‘i Laboratory for Computer-Mediated Experiments and the Study of Culture (HCXC) is a state-of-the-art laboratory equipped with workstations and a full complement of laptop computers permitting both on- and off-site experimental research. The HCXC was created in 2007 with generous funding by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to support research at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa (UHM) on modeling cultural differences in decision-making and cultural change over time.

While maintaining its focus on the Computer-Mediated Study of Culture, the HCXC currently provides the basis for experimental research by UHM researchers in a wide range of applications at the interface of computing and the social sciences. This includes experimental economics, agent-based and other simulations, social network analyses, and research on human computer-interaction, with an emphasis on cross-cultural differences.

About CCPV

Learn of our efforts to apply agent-based simulation software and sociological theory to decision making by visiting the Coherence Based Modeling of Cultural Change and Political Violence (CCPV) project website.

Consider this real-world scenario: Policymakers in Washington are alarmed by the recent rise in Southeast Asia of groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah that espouse a radical and militant form of Islam and engage in violent actions against the West. This has shaken their confidence in the long-held view that the version of Islam in ASEAN countries is largely moderate and pragmatic, and thus unlikely to be the source of a major security threat to the U.S. The policymakers project a long-term U.S. objective of reducing popular support and resources flowing to Jemaah and other radical regional groups such as Abu Sayyaf and the so-called "Laskar Jihad”.

One specific policy being considered is to encourage Indonesian government to monitor or control activities of local Islamic schools (pesantren), which are seen to be the hotbeds producing recruits for terrorist groups, cracking down on those that espouse insurgency. However, it is not whether the long-term effect of this policy will be to educate impressionable youth into less militant and anti-Western viewpoints, or to create an atmosphere of resentment that will simply increase militancy. In addition, this policy is being considered in the context of a larger global issue of how to deal with radical religious educational organizations in frontline countries, such as the madrassa of Afghanistan and the Pakistan Northwest Frontier Province. There is a host of expert historical and ethnographic material available on religion and politics in Indonesia, but most of this is difficult to comprehend and digest for the policymakers and is not designed to generate clear predictions about this specific question, much less extend it to the global context.

What is needed, feel the policymakers, is a way of encapsulating expert knowledge from diverse sources about the cultural configurations of individuals and groups in Indonesia, combining it with the most up-to-date and rigorous social science theories about culture and collective action, and using this to build a computer system that can make a well-grounded prediction about the long-term results of the prospective policy, explain in a clear fashion the reasons for this prediction, and show how well the policy might work in other parts of the world as well. This system would not simply create an artificial world for users to play with, but rather an accurate model of the real societies, based on software- aided distillation of the best information available on cultures and subcultures, and on an implementation into algorithms of tested social science rules that can that can transform the information into clear predictions. This is the kind of system that will be built in the project described here.