Related papers: The Micro Dynamics of Collective Violence
We propose a "social physics" model for two-group conflict. We consider two disputing groups. Each individual i in each of the two groups has a preference si regarding the way in which the conflict should be resolved. The individual…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
The dynamics of a wide range of real systems, from email patterns to earthquakes, display a bursty, intermittent nature, characterized by short timeframes of intensive activity followed by long times of no or reduced activity. The…
A new approach to the understanding of sociological collective behaviour, based on the framework of critical phenomena in physics, is presented. The first step consists of constructing a simple mean-behaviour model and applying it to a…
The Minority Game is a simple model for the collective behavior of agents in an idealized situation where they have to compete through adaptation for a finite resource. This review summarizes the statistical mechanics community efforts to…
Positive social interactions can occur in groups of many shapes and sizes, spanning from small and private to large and open. However, social media tends to binarize our experiences into either isolated small groups or into large public…
Social conventions govern countless behaviors all of us engage in every day, from how we greet each other to the languages we speak. But how can shared conventions emerge spontaneously in the absence of a central coordinating authority? The…
This paper is concerned with a family of Reaction-Diffusion systems that we introduced in [15], and that generalizes the SIR type models from epidemiology. Such systems are now also used to describe collective behaviors.In this paper, we…
One of the most disastrous forms of collective human behaviour is the kind of crowd stampede induced by panic, often leading to fatalities as people are crushed or trampled. Sometimes this behaviour is triggered in life-threatening…
Although the traits emerged in a mass gathering are often non-deliberative, the act of mass impulse may lead to irre- vocable crowd disasters. The two-fold increase of carnage in crowd since the past two decades has spurred significant…
Collectives adapt their network structure to the challenges they face. It has been hypothesized that collectives experiencing a real or imagined threat from an outgroup tend to consolidate behind a few influential group members, and that…
We present a strategy capable of describing basic features of the dynamics of crowds. The behaviour of the crowd is considered from a twofold perspective. We examine both the large scale behaviour of the crowd, and phenomena happening at…
Online social networks are increasingly being utilized for collective sense making and information processing in disasters. However, the underlying mechanisms that shape the dynamics of collective intelligence in online social networks…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Ultra-dense crowds, in which physical contact between people cannot be avoided, pose major safety concerns. Nevertheless, the underlying dynamics driving their collective behaviours remain poorly understood. Existing dense crowd models,…
Protest is ubiquitous in the 21st Century and the people who participate in such movements do so because they seek to bring about social change. However, social change takes time and involves repeated interactions between individual…
We study the severity of conflict-related violence in Colombia at an unprecedented granular scale in space and across time. Splitting the data into different geographical regions and different historically-relevant eras, we uncover…
Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between…
A social network is often divided into many factions. People are friends within each faction, while they are enemies of the other factions, and even my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend. This configuration can be described in terms…
Social life clusters into groups held together by ties that also transmit information. When collective problems occur, group members use their ties to discuss what to do and to establish an agreement, to be reached quick enough to prevent…