Book excerpt: What drives our social mood? Our actions? Our motivations? Can we look into the make-up of the universe and apply it to who we are and what we do? The answers to these questions are to be found in the new science of socionomics. Socionomics evolved from the Wave Principle, a theory of patterns in financial markets. Now Robert Prechter proposes that this very same principle can be applied to our own social and cultural lives. Prechter shows that dominant aspects of our unconscious mentation are characterized by measurable patterns. Those patterns form the building blocks of humankind's social interaction, and in turn, the Wave Principle.