EWI - The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior

Table of Contents

Part I: An Introduction to the Idea of the Wave Principle

Basic Tenets of the Wave Principle

Universal Forms: Fractals, Power Laws and Spirals in Self-Organizing Systems, and Their Connection to the Wave Principle

Robust Fractals and Fibonacci Mathematics

Part II: Validating the Wave Principle by its Own Operation

Modeling and Quantification Support of Validity of the Wave Principle

Forecasting Pattern on the Basis of Pattern

Forecasting Price Extremes on the Basis of Typical Wave Relationships

Relating Aspects of Market Behavior to Wave Degrees

Part III: The Basis of the Wave Principle in Biology, Psychology and Sociology

Unconscious Herding Behavior as the Psychological Basis of the Wave Principle

Theories and Observations Relating to Impulsivity and Herding

Biological Connections to the Robust Fractal Aspect of the Wave Principle

Biological and Perceptual Connections to the Fibonacci Foundation of the Wave Principle

Mentational Connections to the Fibonacci Foundation of the Wave Principle

From Long Waves to Rapid Vibration: The Motor of Life?

Part IV: An Introduction to Socionomics

Components of Mood

Popular Cultural Trends as Manifestations of Social Mood Trends

Historical Impulsion: Events that Result from Social Mood Trends

Forecasting Success Supports the Validity of Socionomics

Thinking Socionomically

Part V: Further Afield

Problems with Conventional Approaches to Financial Markets, and Their Solution in Socionomics

Some Key Fundamentals of Socionomics

The Kitchen Sink: Linking Physics to the Human Social Experience, A Principle Behind Ordered Complexity, Hints of Robust Fractals in the Heavens, the Fibonacci Foundation of Robust Forms, and Phimation as an Opposing Principle to Entropy

Sleeve Description

R.N. Elliott’s announcement of his discovery of the Wave Principle sixty years ago was a major breakthrough in sociology. To summarize Elliott’s achievements, he discovered that the stock market displays fractal geometry, he discovered and described the component patterns and how they link together, he recognized (with the help of Charles Collins) the basis of the patterns in Fibonacci mathematics, and he concluded from all this evidence that human social progress regulates itself according to natural laws of growth and expansion that are found throughout the universe. As Robert Prechter explains herein, this simple yet profound formulation reveals that, on the whole, the endogenous ebb and flow of social mood that propels mankind’s progress follows a robust fractal and spiral design that closely resembles the development of all kinds of living forms.

The practical value of the Wave Principle is that it forms the basis for a new science of socionomics. Socionomics is the study of the formological imperative of human interaction, which in turn is the engine of culture and history. Because people have an impulsive nature that rules in collectives, and because that nature is patterned, mass emotional change has a fair degree of predictability. As a result, its product, social action, does so as well.

This book presents a unifying model of social behavior that should profoundly and irrevocably reshape the social sciences. In this bold stroke, Prechter reconfigures conventional premises of social cause and effect and significantly broadens the scope of sociological thought.