Related papers: The Micro Dynamics of Collective Violence
Many classical models of collective behavior assume that emergent dynamics result from external and observable interactions among individuals. However, how collective dynamics in human populations depend on the internal psychological…
Messages conveyed by media act as a major drive in shaping attitudes and inducing opinion shift. On the other hand, individuals are strongly affected by peer pressure while forming their own judgment. We solve a general model of opinion…
Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in…
The recent availability of data describing social networks is changing our understanding of the "microscopic structure" of a social tie. A social tie indeed is an aggregated outcome of many social interactions such as face-to-face…
We investigate the temporal patterns of human communication and its influence on the spreading of information in social networks. The analysis of mobile phone calls of 20 million people in one country shows that human communication is…
The small-world phenomenon is found in many self-organising systems. Systems configured in small-world networks spread information more easily than in random or regular lattice-type networks. Whilst it is a known fact that small-world…
This paper provides an overview and critical analysis on the modeling and applications of the dynamics of human crowds, where social interactions can have an important influence on the behavioral dynamics of the crowd viewed as a living,…
I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based…
The strategic behaviour of pedestrians is largely determined by how they perceive and react to neighbouring people. This issue is addressed in this paper by a model which combines, in a time and space-dependent way, discrete and continuous…
Enduring violent conflicts are interrupted by lulls without violence. Studies of interevent times found power law distributions based on coarse-grained data with a resolution of one day. Fine-grained data of violence with a resolution of…
Bursty dynamics is a common temporal property of various complex systems in Nature but it also characterises the dynamics of human actions and interactions. At the phenomenological level it is a feature of all systems that evolve…
Records of social interactions provide us with new sources of data for understanding how interaction patterns affect collective dynamics. Such human activity patterns are often bursty, i.e., they consist of short periods of intense activity…
A simple model for the nonlinear collective transport of interacting particles in a random medium with strong disorder is introduced and analyzed. A finite threshold for the driving force divides the behavior into two regimes characterized…
Bursty dynamics characterizes systems that evolve through short active periods of several events, which are separated by long periods of inactivity. Systems with such temporal heterogeneities are not only found in nature but also include…
Social hierarchy in animal groups carries a crucial adaptive function by reducing conflict and injury while protecting valuable group resources. Social hierarchy is dynamic and can be altered by social conflict, agonistic interactions, and…
Current models for opinion dynamics typically utilize a Poisson process for speaker selection, making the waiting time between events exponentially distributed. Human interaction tends to be bursty, though, having higher probabilities of…
Armed conflict data display scaling and universal dynamics in both social and physical properties like fatalities and geographic extent. We propose a randomly branching, armed-conflict model that relates multiple properties to one another…
Social mobilization often fails not for a lack of collective interest, but because of fierce competition between rival movements for the same limited pool of participants. We generalize the classic threshold model of collective behavior to…
Panic may spread over a crowd in a similar fashion as contagious diseases do in social groups. People no exposed to a panic source may express fear, alerting others of imminent danger. This social mechanism initiates an evacuation process,…
Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…