Social, Cultural and Behavioral Sciences

The mission space of the DoD has entered a period of signifi cant growth and change, from traditional state-on-state warfare to irregular warfare and Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) operations. These changes have been accompanied by a growing awareness that mission success will be strongly dependent on an understanding of the cultural dynamics of the geopolitical regions in which operations are likely to occur.

The primary goal of the newly formed Office of Naval Research’s Social, Cultural and Behavioral Sciences Program is to understand, model, and forecast human behavior in ethnically diverse societies as viewed from perspectives that scale from the individual to organizational to societal levels of understanding, then to develop affordable, empirically informed and validated computational models of the sociocultural determinants of the opinions, values, attitudes and actions of individuals and groups in culturally distinct societies for application by naval analysts, planners, trainers, and by the intelligence community in order to:

• Influence attitudes: Create strategies to infl uence the opinions and attitudes of individuals and groups toward terrorism as a political solution and toward the US and its institutions and interests
• Forecast reactions: Forecast terrorist activity and the likely reactions of terrorist organizations to possible U.S. interventions
• Combat radicalization: Understand and more effectively combat the radicalization process
• Reason about deceiving/deceivable agents: Develop systematic approaches for reasoning about the behaviors of asymmetric agents and their networks when they can deceive and be deceived
• Train: Create synthetic tactical entities to populate simulations for training military decision makers and members of the intelligence community in counter-terrorism, irregular warfare, and SSTR operations