The Physics of Teams: Interdependence, Measurable Entropy, and Computational Emotion

Most of the social sciences, including psychology, economics, and subjective social network theory, are modeled on the individual, leaving the field not only a-theoretical, but also inapplicable to a physics of hybrid teams, where hybrid refers to arbitrarily combining humans, machines, and robots into a team to perform a dedicated mission (e.g., military, business, entertainment) or to solve a targeted problem (e.g., with scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs). As a common social science practice, the ingredient at the heart of the social interaction, interdependence, is statistically removed prior to the replication of social experiments; but, as an analogy, statistically removing social interdependence to better study the individual is like statistically removing quantum effects as a complication to the study of the atom. Further, in applications of Shannon’s information theory to teams, the effects of interdependence are minimized, but even there, interdependence is how classical information is transmitted. Consequently, numerous mistakes are made when applying non-interdependent models to policies, the law and regulations, impeding social welfare by failing to exploit the power of social interdependence. For example, adding redundancy to human teams is thought by subjective social network theorists to improve the efficiency of a network, easily contradicted by our finding that redundancy is strongly associated with corruption in non-free markets. Thus, built atop the individual, most of the social sciences, economics, and social network theory have little if anything to contribute to the engineering of hybrid teams. In defense of the social sciences, the mathematical physics of interdependence is elusive, non-intuitive and non-rational. However, by replacing determinism with bistable states, interdependence at the social level mirrors entanglement at the quantum level, suggesting the applicability of quantum tools for social science. We report how our quantum-like models capture some of the essential aspects of interdependence, a tool for the metrics of hybrid teams; as an example, we find additional support for our model of the solution to the open problem of team size. We also report on progress with the theory of computational emotion for hybrid teams, linking it qualitatively to the second law of thermodynamics. We conclude that the science of interdependence advances the science of hybrid teams.