Research on Bipolarity and Reflexivity

This book is an enlarged second edition of A Psychological Theory of Bipolarity and Reflexivity (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). The objective of publishing the second edition is to familiarize readers with the new achievements in the studies of bipolarity and reflexivity, which have been significantly advanced within the last ten years. A special journal, Reflexive Processes and Control, is devoted to these studies and published papers related to their development and applications. The “Workshop on Multi-Reflexive Models of Agent Behavior” took place in 1999 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the main topic discussed was the model described in the first edition of this book. A modified version of the same model is now used for simulation of economic and military decision-making. Some results of this work have already been published. The theory underlying all these studies has been developed as well. While in the early 1990s, the model was purely phenomenological; now it can be deduced theoretically on the base of general principles of information processing done by humans and animals. It has also been demonstrated that the model can describe process of choice made by mammals and birds, as well as by human beings. The most important theoretical and empirical achievements will be included in this edition.