My research starts from a single, ordinary observation: people do not simply hold beliefs or make choices, they build a livable relationship in an environment that is only partly under their control, using resources that are never sufficient to fully understand or manage it. Time is scarce. Attention is scarce. Information arrives incomplete and is read through capacities, biases, and social positions that vary from person to person. Within that scarcity, a person must still act, still relate to others, and still make sense of what has happened to them. The thesis of this program is that adaptive behavior, agency, and rationality are three faces of the same underlying process: a person continuously regulating their own uncertainty, within a changing structure they both inherit and help produce, and gradually converting the meaning they assign to that struggle into an identity.
That process has four moving parts, each developed as its own strand of my research program and drafted in more formal detail elsewhere: the recursive give-and-take between structure and agency under scarcity; the ongoing regulation of uncertainty between the poles of boredom and overwhelm; the way that regulation is carried out socially, through relationships with other people (rather than in isolation); and the way accumulated experience hardens over time, into a stable identity.
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