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Psychohistory

Psychohistory is the convergence of history, sociology and statistics, applied to huge populations to make large scale predictions of future aggregate behaviour in a similar manner to modelling the behaviour of a gas.

In the same way that psychology was extended to cover groups, producing the science of mob psychology, the idea of psychohistory is to extend the idea even further to cover the sweeping changes in group psychology over time to try and use the past and the present to anticipate the general path of the future.

Because of an overlap in the subject areas, this science is connected with Cultural Morphology. The potential of psychohistory was dramatised in the "foundation" novels of novels of Isaac Asimov.

A good example of a psychohistorical change is the womens liberational movement once the possibility of contraception and planned parenthood became available.

Another example is the backlash against the abuse of intellectual property as seen in the free software movement, the music download culture, and project gutenburg.

There is another subject which goes under the name of psychohistory, which seeks to apply the methods of psychoanalysis to finding the motivation of individuals in historical events. Largely based on the analysis of abusive parental relationships in history by Lloyd DeMause since 1974, it has lately been somewhat discredited.