Stein Bråten

Stein Leif Bråten (born 3 November 1934) is a Norwegian sociologist and social psychologist specializing in communication. wikipedia , site

He used the Simula programming language in one of the earliest uses of computers in modelling interpersonal communication (cfr his "A Simulation Study of Personal and Mass Communication". IAG Quarterly Journal of the Administrative Data Processing Group of IFIP, 1968, vol.1, no.2:.7-28).

In 1989 he was awarded a PhD. in psychology at the University of Bergen for work on preverbal communication with infants connected to his theory of the virtual other. He is recognized for his work on mother-child interaction and in 1998 edited Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny, published by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0-521-62257-3). He is professor emeritus at the University of Oslo and is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science. His 1973 article "Model Monopoly and Communication: Systems Theoretical Notes on Democratization" was selected for the Norwegian Sociology Canon by Sosiologinytt in 2011 (issued by the Norwegian Sociological Organization). A main theme in this article is that the so-called 'model strength' of the participants in a conversation (in such as a boardroom) affects the outcome of prolonged conversation as regards influence and power (put simply, this is in contrast to the view that communication in general leads to democratic spread of power).

A Simulation Study of Personal and Mass Communication page

{whole original article, verbatim photocopy} Stein Bråten's (1968) article, xerox of the original article in the IAG Quarterly journal, IFIP Administrative Data Processing Group, (Journal of the administrative data processing group of the international federation for information processing), published in Amsterdam 1968.

This represents if not the first, then certainly one of the first published examples of using computers in scientific modelling of interpersonal communication. The programming language here used is Simula, originated by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, the language (containing Algol as a subset) which is acknowledged to be the source of the concept of object orientation in later programming languages such as C++ and Java.

⇒ Computer Modeling

BRÅTEN, Stein, 2009. The intersubjective mirror in infant learning and evolution of speech. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Advances in consciousness research, v. 76. ISBN 978-90-272-5212-8.