War-Moods: I

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Abstract
A person can be openly friendly, or hostile, or war-weary. Depth-psychology has shown that the underlying mood is also important. In the present theory the independent variable is time, and the dependent variables are the numbers of persons in different warmoods in two opposing nations. The rate of conversion of persons from one mood to another is taken to be proportional both to the number of susceptible persons and to the number of influencing persons, as in Kermack and McKendrick's theory of epidemics of cholera (15). This formulation leads to a set of differential equations nearly but not quite like those whereby Volterra (41) described the interaction between predator and prey among fish. Here the constants are fitted to the history of the First World War. The gregarious motive to follow a fashion of either peace or war is formulated as an amendment.

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