From Social Mood to Collective Events: Measuring the Path by Sociometers

In the paper, I introduce the concept of social mood. It may be defined as the collective feeling/belief a social group or population has about its future on different time scales. On a given time scale, say, a year, the social mood is positive if the population feels that things will be “better” one year from now than they are today; if they believe that things will be worse, then the social mood is negative on that time scale. The social mood is  an example of “internal ideology” of a social group that transforms beliefs and expectations of a set of individuals into different beliefs and expectations that cannot be deduced from individual feelings.

Within the socionomics paradigm, there is a logical dependence: herd instinct → social mood (beliefs/feelings) → social behaviour and collective events. This flow is the central hypothesis of socionomics. Considering various examples of social moods and events (e.g., collapse of Enron Corporation in 2001; history of US presidential elections from the foundation of USA up to the present, building the world’s tallest skyscrapers; Middle East military conflicts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; terrorist attacks and state leader’s assassination), I demonstrate the central hypothesis in action.

In the paper, I suggest using the national stock market indexes as the sociometer. To be more specific, stock market index behaviour does not follow positive or negative social events; it often anticipates them. Moreover, I show that the stock market index is an almost universal indicator of the social mood of population. It works not only for the American realities but everywhere in the world. I describe examples of Brazil, BRICS countries and Turkey to underlie this assumption. These examples provide ample evidence to support the notion that the mood of a population, i.e. its social mood biases the types of social events and behaviours that we can expect to see on all time scales.

I argue that the social mood may beget a specific social behaviour and a set of social events, but not vice versa. Moods may lead or not lead to definite events, while there is no direct feedback from social events to social moods. However, it is important to remember that the implication social mood → social events has a stochastic character. Therefore, the behaviour of sociometers that measure social moods cannot predict social events with certainty; it merely describes the probabilities of different possible events.

The time scale of social mood is very important. The collective events have a natural unfolding time characteristic for the nature of the event. For example, an event involving some aspect of popular culture such as the type of fashions that are in vogue or the sort of books that are popular are short timescale phenomena, generally unfolding over a period of a few months to a year or so. On the other hand, a collective event like the shift in a dominant political ideology has a much longer unfolding time, normally several years to a decade or more. Finally, very slowly-unfolding events like the decline of a global power may take a century or more.

Finally, I propose a draft of research programme for future investigations of social moods. Such a programme must deal with four basic components: 1) data and computation (tool development); 2) social mood analysis; 3) social action analysis; and 4) modelling and exposition.