Human Social Cultural Behavioral Sciences

What Is It?

Human Social Cultural Behavioral (HSCB) Sciences is a technology investment area which strives to improve tactical warfighter training by developing across cultural and socio-cultural skills through the use of models and simulations.

How Does It Work?

Efforts aim to provide decision-makers with the knowledge and tools for understanding adversarial, green and gray populations through the development of data collection and analysis methods, computational social science models and sociocultural training methods and tools.

What Will It Accomplish?

This focus area will to enhance the ability of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps forces to identify, anticipate and defeat adaptive irregular threats operating within the physical, cyber and sociocultural domains. With a focus on operational and tactical level needs, HSCB data collection, analysis methods and socially and culturally informed models of human behavior will enable the warfighter to forecast the effects of BLUFOR actions. The warfighter will be able to identify types of influences that are likely to be effective and how they can be applied to shape the battlespace.

The Office of Naval Research funds multisciplinary social and computational research to improve the warfighter’s understanding of the human terrain. The HSCB focus area seeks to develop a full understanding of social, cultural, and cognitive factors to optimize the warfighter’s ability. This focus area seeks to enable naval forces to identify, anticipate, pre-empt and defeat adaptive irregular threats operating within the complex physical, cyber and sociocultural domains.

To meet the objectives, research funding in the HSCB Sciences supports an integrated portfolio of fundamental research to advanced development to investigate the influence of cultural, social and cognitive factors on human behavior; develop data collection methods; build computational models; and validate operationally applicable tools. HSCB-funded projects are distributed across:

  1. Fundamental research program of theory-driven work, seeking to understand the human-dependant components of asymmetric activities
  2. Related basic research grouped under the “anticipate and affect” tenant lane within ONR’s Sciences Addressing Asymmetric Explosive Threats program;
  3. Growing an applied science base for general use, cross-domain capabilities and tools to support and facilitate the development of HSCB applications. This includes research in the areas of quantitative methods for social and cultural data collection and analysis, theory development and analytic methodologies;
  4. Developing computational modeling capabilities, visualization software tool sets and training and mission rehearsal systems that will provide capabilities for forecasting human terrain responses at various levels;
  5. Integrating computational models into software tools that assist decision-makers in considering human terrain factors; and
  6. Maturing, hardening and validating software that models HSCB influences for integration into the architectures of existing programs of record, or maturing software via open architectures to allow broad systems integration.

Research Challenges and Opportunities:

  • Data challenges – Address the inability to collect data in denied environments, validity/bias of open source data, inconsistent or missing data, and integration of data from various sources
  • HSCB theory and understanding – Advance the theory and understanding of the influence of sociocultural factors on behavior as it applies to military contexts and environments, including an improved ability to validate, provide confidence intervals and weigh data from multiple sources.
  • Analysis and modeling – Develop models and analytical methods that will incorporate sociocultural influences on behavior into decision tools that support operational planners, analysts and training objectives.
  • Training – Provide a program for all Sailors and Marines that encompasses general cross-cultural competency and culture-specific interactions that are deployable and build on culture-general skills.

Point of Contact

Ivy Estabrooke
(703) 588-2396
ivy.estabrooke@navy.mil

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