Program Summary
The explosive growth of global digital connectivity has opened new possibilities for designing and conducting social science research. Once limited by practical constraints to experiments involving just a few dozen participants-often university students or other easily available groups-or to correlational studies of large datasets without any opportunity for determining causation, scientists can now engage thousands of diverse volunteers online and explore an expanded range of important topics and questions. If new tools and methods for harnessing virtual or alternate reality and massively distributed platforms could be developed and objectively validated, many of today's most important and vexing challenges in social science-such as identifying the primary drivers of social cooperation, instability and resilience-might be made more tractable, with benefits for domains as broad as national security, public health, and economics.
To begin to assess the research opportunities provided by today's web-connected world and advanced technologies, DARPA created the Next Generation Social Science (NGS2) program. The NGS2 program will work to determine fundamental measures and causal mechanisms that explain and predict the emergence of collective identity. A focus on "what matters most" for emergent social phenomena such as collective identity presents an important and complex challenge for NGS2 research communities as they seek to validate tools and methods. While the NGS2 program will focus on collective identity formation as an exemplar research question, DARPA anticipates that successful NGS2 capabilities will have benefits for tackling other complex problems and topics, including resilience in social networks and structures, changes in cultural norms or beliefs, emergence of cooperation/competitions and social influences on preferences and cognition.