If corporations are psychopaths, what are charities?

Mitt Romney famously once said, in response to a town hall question, that corporations were people too. Immediately, journalists said that corporations were psychopaths.

Well, actually, this idea has some merit. An organization can be made up of good, smart people, but can act for some reason like something with a personality disorder. This is definitely related to the field of organizational psychology, about which I know very little, but I think this topic of how collective behavior of individuals makes for an organization with a different personality makeup than its individuals is badly explored mathematically.

I have been struggling with how to even begin a model of the collective behavior of the individuals that make up an organization in a way that will identify an organization's personality disorder. In fact, I think rarely does an organization lack a personality disorder. A model of this could explain everything from why some charities have way too much overhead that goes to the fat of the people running the organization to why democracy is failing.

The first mathematical model I thought of was some simplified sensory/actuator model of every person combined with a coarse-graining to find latent emotional states of the collective behavior. In reality, I think that although this is principled, it is unlikely to succeed unless we understand how to model an organism better than we already do. I sincerely hope that this approach is studied at some point in great detail-- and I mean mathematically. Just imagine that every person is modeled as a resource-constrained reinforcement learner who interacts with reward functions that depend on the people next to it, in a multi-agent reinforcement learning setting, and that we then model the behavior of the collective to find latent emotional states that can then be mapped to personality disorders with a mathematical form of the DSM. Undoubtedly, this is the way to proceed once you understand how to set it up mathematically, but on this, I give up, I think for life.

The second mathematical model I went to was a Potts model. This reminds me of the voter models in which people are modeled as Ising spins that I always thought of as being completely made up but basically okay for understanding certain behaviors. In a Potts model, collective behavior is modeled as interactions between particles that can adopt one of N discrete states. These discrete states could be one of several personality types. You then define some sort of interaction energy between these spins that can govern dynamics under several different models, but usually just governs the state into which the collective settles. A renormalization group analysis might then find that the collective, upon decimating using a majority opinion vote or the like, adopts a different discrete state of the Potts model than one might expect. The key is that the interaction energy might lead to frustration or a flipping of states, so that even if the collective starts out as good and smart, it ends up as a narcissist (perhaps a charity with too much overhead and grandiose statements about how much they do) or a psychopath (most corporations, who will screw over their workers for a payday).

In non-mathematical terms, this comes down to saying that the organizational structure is specified by an interaction energy between particles. This includes an understanding of the lattice structure and how far away particles can interact (if they are in an office such that only people at the same desk talk or if there's some movement generally so that one side of the office talks to the other), if there is a mean-field ordering from a mission statement, if separate orders are given to separate parts of the organization so that there are different mean-fields for different parts of the organization, if there are leaders that unduly influence the spins and are themselves stubborn, if disagreement is encouraged or discouraged which could lead to frustration or alignment.

One day, I hope to come back to this mathematical idea when I understand more about personality. In the meantime, if you have a way to turn this into something, please do!