Fascinating account of the application of mathematical modelling to bickering couples as a means of predicting divorce and other unrest.
What the students were modeling in that lounge was not "marriage" per se, but the dynamics of marital conversations. Before looking at data from any real-world couples, they began with some very simple hypotheses: the idea, for example, that spouses will react emotionally to the most recent comment made by their partners. At this early stage they sketched crude "influence functions" — calculus equations that described a dynamic system in which a snarky comment by one spouse would result in negative emotions in the partner, sometimes resulting in a downward spiral. When they tested those first equations against the Love Lab's data, however, they did not match at all.
The scholars soon realized that they needed to add a constant that represented each partner's "uninfluenced steady state" — that is, the person's general level of cheerfulness or gloom, independent of the spouse's behavior on a particular day. "In retrospect, we should have thought of that at the very beginning," says Mr. Murray. "But once we added that constant, everything fell in just beautifully."
(via Futurismic)
