The Behavior Modality: Studying Human Behavior In The Wild

"Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge." - Baruch Spinoza

Our aim is to explore the Behavior Modality. This involves explaining, predicting, and optimizing human behavior in the real world, especially, from the context of marketing, advertising, and computational social science.

Get in touch with us at behavior-in-the-wild@googlegroups.com

Behavior as a modality1 occurs in the process of communication. Communication includes all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another [1]. This includes all forms of expression, such as words, gestures, speech, pictures, and musical sounds.

Communication is composed of five modalities (shown in the diagram below (Fig. 1)): (1) Speaker, (2) Content, (3) Channel, (4) Receiver, (5) Behavior (Effect). One can also include two other (minor) modalities to these five: (6) Time of sending (7) Time of receiving. These modalities may vary independently of each other [2], [3], [4] and carry signals about each other [5], [6] [7]. The message as a modality carries information from the communicator to receiver and encodes information generated by the communicator. Similarly, behavior (aka effect) as a modality carries information from the receiver and encodes information generated by the receiver. This is often a continuous cycle, where behavior generated in the previous cycle becomes the message of the next cycle, thus forming a conversation.

Human Behavior - Factors of Communication

Therefore, from the above seven modalities, we get the following problems:

A motivation of why we are work on the behavior modality is captured in a small blog by Yaman.

Our Contributions:


  1. A modality is defined in terms of information, such that a modality is a medium through which information is conveyed [7], [8], [9]. Similarly, a multimodal distribution is defined as having more than one peak in the probability distribution describing the nature of information.