Description
This book proposes a simple but radical shift: from modeling behavior as the outcome of choices made by isolated agents, to understanding it as the trajectory of a relational field. Across disciplines, persistent anomalies - context effects, instability, polarization, cooperation under cost - suggest that classical functional models are not merely incomplete but structurally inadequate. Their core assumption, that preferences can be represented by stable functions, fails in systems where interaction, history, and identity are intrinsic. The framework developed here replaces functions with fields, choices with trajectories, and equilibrium with geometric structure. Behavior is generated by potentials, directed by gradients, stabilized (or destabilized) by curvature, and organized into phases determined by a small set of parameters. A central contribution is the unification of three mechanisms of social stabilization: relatedness (Hamilton), reciprocity (Trivers), identification (Messick), into a single operator of compensation. Together, they explain how cooperation emerges, persists or collapses.