Modeling Populations of Interest in Order to Simulate Cultural Response to Influence Activities

This paper describes an effort by Sandia National Laboratories to model and simulate populations of specific countries of interest as well as the population’s primary influencers, such as government and military leaders. To accomplish this, high definition cognition models are being coupled with an aggregate model of a population to produce a prototype, dynamic cultural representation of a specific country of interest. The objective is to develop a systems-level, intrinsic security capability that will allow analysts to better assess the potential actions, counteractions, and influence of powerful individuals within a country of interest before, during, and after an US initiated event. 1 Societal Assessment Capability The United States is finding itself increasingly engaged in the development of unconventional partnerships that require a variety of non-traditional activities to better support political and economic stability in regions of interest. Unfortunately, there is no effective means to adequately forecast and assess how both individual leaders, and the people they influence, will behave with regard to possible US policies and actions. It is asserted here that an accurate characterization of a society must represent this interaction between people under control, those influencing power, and external variables, such as US actions or oil revenue variation (in counties dependent on oil). While assessment tools have modeled and simulated societies, they have, thus far, been limited to gross behavioral models. Furthermore, no existing macroeconomic or societal model addresses security dynamics or coordinated multiple kinetic and non-kinetic interventions. We believe that the phenomena that maintain or transition dictatorship and democracy have recently become understandable enough to pose testable hypotheses amenable to simulation. As such, the ability to address intervention dynamics and unintended, higher order consequences is a key goal of this work. In pursuit of this goal, Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) has developed a prototype societal assessment capability that assists in the behavioral influence analysis of foreign targets of interest. The objective of the described work is to develop a systems-level capability that will allow analysts to better assess potential actions and counter-actions of individuals interacting within a foreign country of interest before, during, and after an US initiated event. The assessment is designed to address the dynamics that drive stability and instability. Specifically, it is designed to: (1) assess adversarial choice options that allow analysts to pose “what-if” queries concerning hypothetical policy and/or military initiatives to help determine how and why a population may react to a specific event, leader, or operation across time, (2) assess potential blind spots by providing analysts with the ability to better understand higher order interaction effects between leaders and local societies and how allegiances are formed and changed over time, (3) perform risk analysis by determining the limiting assumptions and unknowns for the successful outcome, and (4) perform risk management by establishing whether there are delayed consequences that will require mitigation or adjustments to planning. Collectively, this type of simulation is designed to permit assessment of shaping activities and US tactics in an operational environment by creating a system that can help an analyst better understand the interaction between leaders and local societies and how allegiances are formed and changed over time. To accomplish this Sandia is utilizing its extensive technical expertise in Modeling & Simulation (M&S) to create a social simulation platform that couples HighDefinition Cognitive Models (HDCM) with a cultural, economic, and policy-based simulation. The HDCMs are purposely designed to computationally represent the mindset of specific individuals, including their cognitive perceptions, goals, emotion states, and action intentions. The actions of one HDCM can affect the mindset and actions of others, as well as the general mindset of the society in which they are situated. The society, computationally represented in this initial effort by Sandia’s Systems Dynamics-based Aggregate Societal Model (SDASM) can, in turn, affect the actions of the HDCMs (see Figure 1). The HDCM is focused on individual or smallgroup level of analysis, whereas the SDASM is focused at an aggregate level social, economic, and cultural level of analysis. These models are joined to provide a highfidelity, scaleable assessment tool of individuals, small groups, and society to produce outcome distributions investigating attitudinal and behavioral reactions to US policies for a given country, group, or ethnic region. Figure 1. A conceptual view of Sandia’s High Definition Aggregate Societal Model-