A1 Isolated individual distortion

Topic

The starting point is the individual, represented as a generalized actor who makes choices—regarding consumption, labor, savings, migration, childbearing, trust, or participation in collective action—based on a cost-benefit decision function applied to the options presented by their context. This cost-benefit decision function does not operate in a vacuum; it relies on a vector of personal characteristics—preferences, available resources, identity, and risk tolerance—while resource constraints limit the individual to choosing from a restricted set of options. The individual resolves this decision independently, without the participation of any other actor in the calculation.

What the individual’s cost-benefit decision function actually utilizes is not the objective cost or benefit of each option, but rather their private perception of that cost or benefit. This is where the model’s first distortion arises: targeted manipulation, a situation of information asymmetry (where the individual knows less than the other party), or the deliberate exploitation of a cognitive bias causes the private perception of cost or benefit to diverge from the option's actual cost or benefit. The greater the targeted manipulation, information asymmetry, or exploited bias, the wider the gap between what the individual believes is in their best interest and what would actually serve their interests if the decision were made with complete information and without induced bias.

This distortion of the private perception of cost or benefit is defined by a specific feature that distinguishes it from any other source of individual error: it occurs on a one-to-one basis, without the mediation of any group. Targeted manipulation, information asymmetry, or exploited cognitive bias reaches the individual in isolation—independent of what is happening to anyone else in the same context; there is no shared social signal, no third party coordinating multiple people simultaneously, and no collective threshold being crossed in unison. It is this combination, acting on each person individually, that causes their cost-benefit decision function—fueled by an already distorted private perception—to yield a decision different from the one they would have made absent that distortion.

The decision ultimately made by the individual—whether or not their private perception of cost or benefit is distorted in this individual manner—serves as the unit which, when repeated and aggregated across many instances in the same context, generates the population-level behavior measured by the six channels of collective behavior: social diffusion and contagion; polarization and group identity; crowd dynamics; collective cognition and group decision-making; leadership and asymmetric influence; and trust, cooperation, and collective action. The way this isolated individual distortion reaches each person—independently, without a shared mechanism—means its footprint within that population behavior appears as altered decisions scattered among different individuals, rather than as a coordinated movement of many people acting in unison.

Ultimately, this first level of distortion makes it possible to isolate—within any decision an individual makes (whether to consume, work, save, migrate, have children, trust, or join a collective action)—the specific portion of that decision that deviates from the individual's actual cost-benefit calculation due to targeted manipulation, information asymmetry, or exploited cognitive bias, all occurring at the individual level before any group or social context has had the opportunity to influence that calculation.

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