Statistical physics of social dynamics
Abstract
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the interactions of individuals as elementary units in social structures. Here we review the state of the art by focusing on a wide list of topics ranging from opinion, cultural and language dynamics to crowd behavior, hierarchy formation, human dynamics, social spreading. We highlight the connections between these problems and other, more traditional, topics of statistical physics. We also emphasize the comparison of model results with empirical data from social systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0710.3256,
title = {Statistical physics of social dynamics},
author = {Claudio Castellano and Santo Fortunato and Vittorio Loreto},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0710.3256},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
58 pages, 22 figures. Final version published in Reviews of Modern Physics