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This chapter presents a poverty simulation as a critical pedagogical tool that breaks down preconceptions and provides information about real-life challenges experienced by those who are poor. It allows students to develop the critical thinking skills, perspective-taking, and empathy. It provides an opportunity to take social and intellectual risks, and motivates civic engagement for positive social change. As such, this chapter contributes to the volume’s focus on curriculum and pedagogical changes using education to promote social change. Simulation participants attempt to successfully negotiate four 15-minute weeks within families of various sizes and resources. At the conclusion of the simulation, participants take a few minutes to reflect in writing on their experience. Students identify and discuss the social structures that they felt helped to perpetuate their poverty, as well as how micro-level interactions (i.e., with service providers, teachers, police, people in their neighborhood) affected their outcomes. Results show students increased understanding of the social issues contributing to poverty as well as consequences of poverty, and they report an increased desire to take action to affect positive social change in their community. The chapter concludes with thoughts and recommendations on how students from various disciplines could benefit from this poverty simulation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe two social simulations created to assess leadership potential and train leaders to make effective decisions in turbulent environments. One is set in the novel environment of a lunar moon colony and the other is a military combat command. The research generated from these simulations for assessing the decision effectiveness of potential leaders with different personality traits and decision styles under varying degrees of information quantity, uncertainty and complexity is summarized. Opportunities and limitations of applying current computer assisted technology to social simulations for assessing and developing leaders' decision effectiveness in turbulent environments is discussed.

College undergraduates and officer candidates in university ROTC programs made a series of decisions while being subjected to varying degrees of environmental turbulence in social simulations. The decision effectiveness of subjects with different personality characteristics under varying degrees of environmental turbulence was assessed through researcher observations, self‐reports, and peer ratings.

Social simulations are a cost effective way to assess and train leaders to make effective decisions in turbulent environments. The results of controlled experiments in social simulations have suggested that leaders with high levels of cognitive complexity and incongruity adaptation are more likely to be successful in highly turbulent environments than leaders with lower levels of incongruity adaptation ability and cognitive complexity who are more effective in more stable and structured situations.

The ease of modifying computer games renders them effective as low‐cost virtual worlds that have relevance in military leadership experimentation. However, the use of computer simulations alone fails to capture the impact that relationships and emotions have on leader decision making, highlighting the continuing need for social simulations that include these interpersonal aspects of decision making.

By participating in realistic social simulations, leaders can experiment with new decision styles without the risk of making real world mistakes that could jeopardize their own and their organization's future. The leaders who are most successful in adapting their decision style to the more complex requirements can be identified for promotion or assignment to appropriate settings.

Both military and civilian organizations are in need of cost effective way to assess and train leaders to make effective decisions in turbulent environments. Social simulations provide a unique approach to meeting these needs and can simultaneously provide a venue for research in associated areas.

The U.S. has a deficit problem. Both political parties agree that the debt and the deficit must be addressed, but are at odds about how to do so. Worse still, there are members of both parties who make finding solutions difficult because of entrenched ideology. As we approach the second year of Congressional impasse, it appears that this crisis is far from over. It is little wonder that teaching students about this issue is difficult. There are myriad nuances and complexities that are challenging to get across to students through traditional means. Simulations are one way to introduce students to complex phenomena by allowing them to experience them. Simulations have proven to be effective teaching tools for addressing subjective experiences and fostering inquiry. Shifts in student dispositions also may occur with simulations. This paper walks the reader through an adaptation of the board game Monopoly to demonstrate how this simulation game can be used to teach students about the deficit crisis and debate from multiple perspectives across the socioeconomic spectrum.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that in cross-cultural and strategic management, we must pay attention to the processes creating and maintaining culture. How can everyday interactions give rise to national, “deep” cultures, recognizable across centuries, or organizational cultures, recognizable across decades?

This is a conceptual paper using the evidence provided by research about cultural patterns, and using sociological status-power theory to explain the causation of these patterns. Emergence, also called self-organization, is introduced as mechanism connecting individual-level causation with resulting system-level patterns. Cases are used to illustrate points.

Simulation gaming and computational social simulation are introduced. These methods allow “growing” a system, thus allowing to experiment with potential interventions and their unanticipated effects.

This essay could have major implications for research, adding new methods to survey-based and case-based studies, and achieving a new synthesis. Strategic management today almost invariably involves cross-cultural elements. As a result, cross-cultural understanding is now strategically important.

The suggestions in this essay could lead to new collaborations in the study of culture and organizational processes. Examples include team formation, negotiation, mergers and acquisitions, trans-national collaboration, incentive systems and job interviews.

The suggestions in this essay could contribute to our ability of proactively steering processes in organizations. In particular, they can provide a check to the notion that a control measure necessarily results in its intended effect.

The synthesis of biological, sociological and cross-cultural psychological viewpoints with design-oriented method, using games or social simulations as research instruments, is original in the field.

Democracy is learned through doing, not telling. The purpose of this paper is to report the findings from an action research project where a group of fourth-grade students participated in a simulation that explored the possibilities and the constraints of acting democratically, while faced with the dilemmas of environmental disaster and establishing a new society.

The authors studied how participating students engaged in deliberations and self-directed inquiry. The authors focused the data collection on the responses of students to the challenges presented in the simulation.

Based on the analysis of student work during the simulation and reflection on the simulation after the project, the authors documented the ways in which students critiqued authority or expressed their distrust in it, engaged in difficult deliberations around controversial issues, and developed expanded agency through inquiry-based learning.

This paper presented a model of inquiry learning that can be critical, i.e. examining issues of power and justice, while engaging in deliberation via a simulation that integrated social studies and English language arts. Creating space for young students to deliberate issues, steeped in values, and ethics, allows them to recognize the inherent tension and dissension necessary to a healthy democracy.

This chapter conceptualizes computational methods across three related, yet distinct approaches: (1) Social Simulation, (2) Data Science, and (3) Big Data. Group communication research is then situated and reviewed along these three lines of research. Although some areas have considerable visibility (e.g., network analysis, text mining), some areas are less visible in group communication research (e.g., Social Simulation, Big Data designs). The chapter concludes with suggestions for issues regarding reliability, validity, and ethics.

This chapter wants to understand under which circumstances and conditions non-traditional aids are effective in the strategic process. This study builds an agent-based computational simulation model – the S-uFUNK 2.1.0 – to explore the research question. The model features a group of managers that seeks to interpret environmental cues using both traditional and non-traditional tools. When interpretations converge, the group then settles on different focus areas to define a business strategy for their organization. The process is set in a way such that 11 parameters can be manipulated to explore the different conditions under which non-traditional aids are of use. Results suggest that non-traditional aids differ from traditional aids only in limited circumstances and that social dynamics and dispositions within the group are crucial. In general, the simulation helps us reflect on the way in which we consider traditional aids to strategy. In fact, if they are no different than non-traditional aids, their effectiveness is directly challenged.

In 1968, Garrett Hardin identified a class of common goods that suffer under traditional market mechanisms. As a result, institutions become pivotal in defining acceptable consumption behavior. This paper describes the results of an agent-based computer simulation used to study how institutional forces shape consumption patterns. The results suggest common-interested behaviors support a greater population at a higher quality of living; however, exclusively common-interested behaviors result in underutilized commons, and the whole is generally less well off. Overall, when populations generally act in the common-interest, the commons, the population and individuals all experience higher quality outcomes than when they act in generally or exclusively self-interested ways. The paper frames further applications in terms of managing growth for long-term sustainability.

The present chapter expands on recent research demonstrating an empirical link between theoretical constructs within affect control theory (ACT) and expectation states theory. I explore the utility of a joint application of the two theories, employing simulated interactions to examine status organizing processes.

Although simulation results do not constitute data by which theoretical claims can be tested, they are useful for developing new research questions. I report results from a series of simulated dyadic interactions using ACT’s Interact program to investigate potential emotional and identity processes that underlie the enactment of status differences, and to explore affective responses to the legitimation and delegitimation of status orders.

Simulation results call attention to a dynamic interplay between structural elements of the situation and the agentic behavior of interactants, suggesting that behavioral attempts to reduce deflections may lead to shifts in expectations over the course of interaction. Results raise the possibility that differences in affective impressions may produce expectations that are initially asymmetrical between interaction partners. Further, results suggest that the standardized tasks commonly employed in expectation states research may unintentionally generate affective responses that encourage status convergence.

Drawing on insights and methods from ACT, expectation states researchers can improve the scientific understanding of small group interaction. Employing simulated interactions, researchers can promote theoretical advancement by uncovering new lines of inquiry at the intersection of two prominent social psychological traditions. Simulations also provide a further tool for methodological refinement within the standardized experimental setting.