Chapter 3: Dynamical Social Psychology: On Complexity and Coordination in Human Experience

Human experience reflects the interplay of myriad forces operating on various time scales to promote constantly evolving patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. Yet people’s mental states, actions, and social relations are also characterized by coherence and stability. The simultaneous dynamism and coherence of human experience represents a serious challenge for traditional theories and research paradigms in social psychology, but it reflects the essence of dynamical systems. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new paradigm—dynamical social psychology—that develops the implications of dynamical systems for a wide range of personal and interpersonal phenomena. We outline the essential concepts and principles of this perspective and illustrate its utility by describing its recent application to 2 perennial issues: social influence and the coordination of behavior and internal states in social relationships.