I have deliberately cultivated an interest in how people rally around a common idea.How do you get multiple players to agree to fix their attention and resources? By agreeing to the rules of course!
I hate to reduce living human systems to variables but we clearly can encourage and discourage values. And what we value isn’t all that rational. But you can intuit many of the incentives that go into complex coordination problems.
I think it drives intelligent systems thinkers absolutely crazy that there can a calculable set of inputs and we still don’t quite grasp how the output came to be. The engineering minded and the highly numerate can find human intuition quite foreign. Cue memes about autists.
I happen to think that most humans don’t vary all that much from our biology though and you can backtrack a lot about a situation by assuming everyone is going through some baseline similarities.
And we’d be better served trying to understand what most people are going through is at least legible through common ties to basic instincts like hunger and fatigue. Animals having animal reactions is still the reality for even the most edged case among us. We can tolerate a lot when we think of the shared bonds of human culture coming down to needs we all share.