Related papers: From Statistical Physics to Social Sciences: The P…
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…
This opening editorial aims to interest researchers and encourage novel research in the closely related fields of sociophysics and computational social science. We briefly discuss challenges and possible research directions in the study of…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
In this article, the notion of a mathematical model in science is attempted to be enlightened from several points of view. In particular, it is shown that mathematical models are introduced differently and used differently in different…
Extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals is unique to humans, who often sacrifice personal benefits for the common good and work together to achieve what they are unable to execute alone. The evolutionary success of our species is…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
In this essay, I attempt to provide supporting evidence as well as some balance for the thesis on `Transforming socio-economics with a new epistemology' presented by Hollingworth and Mueller (2008). First, I review a personal highlight of…
Statistics is one of the most valuable of disciplines. Science is based on proof and it alone produces results, other approaches are not, and do not. Statistics is the only acceptable language of proof in science. Yet statistics is…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…
Statistical analysis is an important tool to distinguish systematic from chance findings. Current statistical analyses rely on distributional assumptions reflecting the structure of some underlying model, which if not met lead to problems…
In the same way as the Hilbert Program was a response to the foundational crisis of mathematics, this article tries to formulate a research program for the socio-economic sciences. The aim of this contribution is to stimulate research in…
We build simple computational models of belief dynamics within the framework of discrete-spin statistical physics models, and explore how suitable they are for understanding and predicting real-world belief change on both the individual and…
How should computer science and social science collaborate to build a common model? How should they proceed to gather data that is really useful to the modelling? How can they design a survey that is tailored to the target model? This paper…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…
This special volume of Statistical Sciences presents some innovative, if not provocative, ideas in the area of reliability, or perhaps more appropriately named, integrated system assessment. In this age of exponential growth in science,…
Socio-economic inequalities are manifested in different aspects of our social life. We discuss various aspects, beginning with the evolutionary and historical origins, and discussing the major issues from the social and economic point of…
As the twin movements of open science and open source bring an ever greater share of the scientific process into the digital realm, new opportunities arise for the meta-scientific study of science itself, including of data science and…
Methods of statistical physics have proven valuable for studying the evolution of cooperation in social dilemma games. However, recent empirical research shows that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is only one kind of a more general…
Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…