More "us," less "them": An appeal for pluralism - and stand-alone computational theorizing - in our science of social groups

Abstract

The target article is an appeal to allow explicit computational theorizing into the study of social groups. Some commentators took this proposal and ran with it, some had questions about it, and some were confused or even put off by it. But even the latter did not seem to outright disagree - they thought the proposal was mutually exclusive with some other enterprise, when in fact it is not. Unfortunately, scientists studying social groups have not yet avoided the thread-bare trope of the blind men studying the different parts of the elephant: We see mutual exclusivity when we should see complementarity. I hope we can all take the next steps of examining how the different enterprises and approaches within our area of research might all fit together into a unified whole.