Related papers: The Emergence of Consensus: A Primer

Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…

Online social networks have transformed the way in which humans communicate and interact, leading to a new information ecosystem where people send and receive information through multiple channels, including traditional communication media.…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

Social groups are fundamental elements of any social system. Their emergence and evolution are closely related to the structure and dynamics of a social system. Research on social groups was primarily focused on the growth and the structure…

We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…

A mathematical theory on flocking serves the foundation for several ubiquitous multi-agent phenomena in biology, ecology, sensor networks, economy, as well as social behavior like language emergence and evolution. Directly inspired by the…

Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…

Models of cooperation grounded on social networks and on the ability of individuals to choose actions and partners aim to describe human social behavior. Extensive computer simulations of these models give important insight in the social…

Models of the consensus of the individual state in social systems have been the subject of recent researches in the physics literature. We investigate how network structures coevolve with the individual state under the framework of social…

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…

We propose a simple model of social network formation that parameterizes the tendency to establish acquaintances by the relative distance in a representative social space. By means of analytical calculations and numerical simulations, we…

Models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence show a sharp transition between a consensus and a polarization phase at a critical global bound of confidence. In this paper, heterogeneous bounds of confidence are studied. The…

Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…

The very notion of social network implies that linked individuals interact repeatedly with each other. This allows them not only to learn successful strategies and adapt to them, but also to condition their own behavior on the behavior of…

Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…

Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…

Many complex systems are characterized by broad distributions capturing, for example, the size of firms, the population of cities or the degree distribution of complex networks. Typically this feature is explained by means of a preferential…

The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…

Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…

Cooperation is central to the success of human societies as it is crucial for overcoming some of the most pressing social challenges of our time. Yet how human cooperation is achieved and may persist is still a main puzzle in the social and…