Related papers: The Micro Dynamics of Collective Violence

During intergroup confrontations, agitating stimuli such as opponents' threats and provocations can trigger collective violence, even without the usual mechanisms of ingroup cooperation, such as norms with sanctions. We examine video…

How can minorities of individuals overturn social conventions? The theory of critical mass states that when a committed minority reaches a critical size, a cascade of behavioural changes can occur, overturning apparently stable social…

The success of an on-line movement could be defined in terms of the shift to large-scale and the later off-line massive street actions of protests. The role of social media in this process is to facilitate the transformation from small or…

Fights-to-the-death occur in many natural, medical and commercial settings. Standard mass action theory and conventional wisdom imply that the minority (i.e. smaller) group's survival time decreases as its relative initial size decreases,…

We report a remarkable universality in the patterns of violence arising in three high-profile ongoing wars, and in global terrorism. Our results suggest that these quite different conflict arenas currently feature a common type of enemy,…

If you search for 'collective behaviour' with your web browser most of the texts popping up will be about group activities of humans, including riots, fashion and mass panic. Nevertheless, collective behaviour is also considered to be an…

This paper deals with the kinetic theory modeling of crowd dynamics with the aim of showing how the dynamics at the micro-scale is transferred to the dynamics of collective behaviors. The derivation of a new model is followed by a…

We investigate the collective behavior of a system of social agents subject to the competition between two mass media influences considered as external fields. We study under what conditions either of two mass media with different…

Individuals in free societies frequently exhibit striking coordination when making independent decisions en masse. Examples include the regular appearance of hit products or memes with substantially higher popularity compared to their…

In the era of social media, every day billions of individuals produce content in socio-technical systems resulting in a deluge of information. However, human attention is a limited resource and it is increasingly challenging to consume the…

Living groups move in complex environments and are constantly subject to external stimuli, predatory attacks and disturbances. An efficient response to such perturbations is vital to maintain the group's coherence and cohesion.…

This study extends classical models of spreading epidemics to describe the phenomenon of contagious public outrage, which eventually leads to the spread of violence following a disclosure of some unpopular political decisions and/or…

The conflicts between armed groups often go on for years. The classical model of such conflicts accounts for the number of participants and for the technology level of the equipment of the groups. Below we extend this model in order to…

To understand the origin of bursty dynamics in natural and social processes we provide a general analysis framework, in which the temporal process is decomposed into sub-processes and then the bursts in sub-processes, called contextual…

Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion…

Collective memory is a common representation of the past shared by a group of people that modulates its identity. Recent literature on computational social science quantifies collective memories using expressions of those memories…

This contribution describes efforts to model the behavior of individual pedestrians and their interactions in crowds, which generate certain kinds of self-organized patterns of motion. Moreover, this article focusses on the dynamics of…

The motion of pedestrian crowds (e.g. for simulation of an evacuation situation) can be modeled as a multi-body system of self driven particles with repulsive interaction. We use a few simple situations to determine the simplest allowed…

We propose models describing the collective dynamics of two opposing groups of individuals with stochastic communication. Individuals from the same group are assumed to align in a stochastic manner, while individuals from different groups…

In this paper I propose a 'mechanism' for the explanation of power-law characteristics of casualty dynamics in inter-state wars, intra-state wars and terrorist attacks: the scale-free physical organization of social systems. Other…