Appreciative inquire explains social change by identifying mechanisms for collective action which establish a normative vision that guides the evolution of the social system or group. In its essence, this theory suggests that social systems evolve toward the highest ideals held by the social group.

"PB98-151277." Caption title. Includes bibliographical references (p. 8-9).

Appreciative inquiry explains social change by identifying mechanisms for collective action which establish a normative vision that guides the evolution of the social system of a group. In its essence this theory suggests that social systems evolve toward the highest ideals held by the social group. Systems that develop positive images of the other and heliotropic, or positive, reinforcement loops show how social change can be guided by affirmative images. Change in social systems must also follow success in competition during an evolutionary process which is guided by the Maximum Empower Principle. This principle states that system designs which maximize empower (emergy per unit time) production for the whole system are the ones that survive. Emergy normalizes the many kinds of energy flows in a hierarchical system to that they are expressed in equivalent units. We designed a simple experiment to determine if social systems with heliotropic loops generated more empower than systems without such interactions. We determined the empower production of six possible modes of interaction between two social groups competing for the same resource base by simulating six Energy System models, each representing a mode of social interaction. The cumulative empower produced by these models was compared to rank the interaction modes in order of their expected competitiveness in the evolutionary process. A path for the evolution of social systems where two groups compete for the same resources was proposed based on our simulation results. In general the three designs containing heliotropic loops generated more empower than the design with no social interaction and the two designs with negative social interactions.