Perception-Based Resilience: Accounting for the Impact of Human Perception on Resilience Thinking

Resilience is the capacity of a system to withstand large disturbances and dramatically changing conditions without losing its core purpose and integrity and achieve generalized recovery once failure happens. Due to the many dimensions of this concept, we have previously argued for a taxonomy that can account for its various contexts. What is significantly missing in our taxonomy, however, is the important notion that our ability, and that of our systems, to be resilient is conditioned by our perceptions, especially under sub-optimal conditions or extreme constraints. In this paper, we argue for a perception-based resilience framework that integrates theories in psychology and resilience research. We also succinctly presented our mental state model of perception based on theories in the psychology of entertainment and used it in a simulation that demonstrates how we can account for the impact of perception on resilience thinking by focusing on the dynamics of individual perceptions and the emergence of collective perception and behavior from diverse perceptions. Lastly, we argue that resilience-oriented perception modeling is a problem domain for social computing.