Human Behavior As A Fractal

How we behave is self-similar on many scales.

Just the other day, I had the opportunity to watch the movie, “Peppermint”, featuring Jennifer Garner. I was interested in the film because I had seen Garner in the television series Alias and I really enjoyed it. So this movie has a typical revenge plot where someone is wronged, then the victim spends years planning for and exacting revenge on everyone she thought had wronged her. I kind of knew what to expect, but I figured that Garner would have found a good script and cast.

The movie was underwhelming, but I decided to continue watching it for another reason. As the movie unfolded, I began to notice a sort of self-similar pattern that repeats in the movie in the culture I live in. Here is the movie plot according to the Internet Movie Database:

“Five years after her husband and daughter are killed in a senseless act of violence, a woman comes back from self-imposed exile to seek revenge against those responsible and the system that let them go free.”

To avenge the murder of her husband and her daughter, the protagonist Riley North, goes after members of the drug cartel who pulled the trigger. She also goes after the people working in the drug shop where they package the product. Then she goes after the judge who set the shooters free in order to save his own skin from the drug cartel. I think she did some more, too, but I can’t remember all of it. That is a lot of effort to avenge two deaths. I thought it was interesting that she did not pursue all the people who bought the drugs that made the drug trade possible.

As I mentioned earlier, I saw a self-similar, repeating pattern in the behavior of the characters in the movie. Fractals are like that. Fractals are self-similar patterns of information. Below, you can see an example of a fractal that I created years ago. With a computer program like Fractal Explorer, we can run an algorithm to color each pixel in the frame. We can use the computer to “zoom in” to any area on the image to find that those patterns repeat down to the limits of the resolution of the program at work.

I see human behavior in this way. Our behavior is self-similar and repeats itself on many scales. This is one reason why I talk about human behavior…