DARPA’s Ground Truth program will create war game for testing the validity of social science models

The social sciences can play important roles in assisting military planners and decision-makers who are trying to understand complex human social behaviors and systems, potentially facilitating a wide range of missions including humanitarian, stability, and counter-insurgency operations.

Current social science approaches to studying behavior rely on a variety of modeling methods—both qualitative and quantitative—which seek to make inferences about the causes of social phenomena on the basis of observations in the real-world. Yet little is known about how accurate these methods and models really are, let alone whether the connections they observe and predict are truly matters of cause and effect or mere correlations.

“We use these models because our ability to think through the behaviour of complex systems, and the consequences of various assumptions about individual behaviour, is kind of limited,” Russell explains. “And so these models can help us crank through what would actually happen given basic assumptions.”

To improve knowledge of social science modeling’s capabilities and limitations, DARPA  announced its Ground Truth program in 2017. The program aims to use artificial, yet plausible, computer-based social-system simulations with built-in “ground truth” causal rules as testbeds to validate the accuracy of various social science modeling methods.

“The real-world operates according to dynamic, interactive, non-linear, and sometimes adaptive and changing rules that we don’t understand very well, all of which limit our efforts to determine causality in social systems,” said Adam Russell, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “We want to develop computationally simulated worlds where we create and therefore understand all the causal processes and rules. Then we can test a variety of social science modeling methods to see how well they identify the known causal processes built into the simulation.”