Related papers: Social Mechanics
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…
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…
This work continues the one commenced in a previous one, where the key idea is that individual stances on a social matter can be modeled as positions of particles in physics. Here, we explore the aggregation of individual behavior as a…
Processes of mass communications in complicated social or sociobiological systems such as marketing, economics, politics, animal populations, etc. as a subject for the special scientific discipline - "mediaphysics" - are considered in its…
The paper discusses the fundamental characteristics distinguishing the natural and social systems from each other. It considers in detail the basic approaches, prospects, and possibilities of constructing mathematical description for social…
It is suggested that the motion of pedestrians can be described as if they would be subject to `social forces'. These `forces' are not directly exerted by the pedestrians' personal environment, but they are a measure for the internal…
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…
Influence theory is a foundational theory of physics that is not based on traditional empirically defined concepts, such as positions in space and time, mass, energy, or momentum. Instead, the aim is to derive these concepts, and their…
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…
I give an overview of the topic of this special issue, the applications of (statistical) physics to social sciences at large. I discuss several examples of simple social models put forward by physicists and discuss their interest. I argue…
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…
The paper discusses fundamental problems in mathematical description of social systems based on physical concepts, with so-called statistical social systems being the main subject of consideration. Basic properties of human beings and human…
This work reflects on mechanics as an epistemological framework on the state of a physical system to regard dynamics as the distribution of mechanical properties over spacetime coordinates. The resulting distribution is taken to be the…
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…
Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…
Although not as wide, and popular, as that of quantum mechanics, the investigation of fundamental aspects of statistical mechanics constitutes an important research field in the building of modern physics. Besides the interest for itself,…
This editorial opens the special issues that the Journal of Statistical Physics has dedicated to the growing field of statistical physics modeling of social dynamics. The issues include contributions from physicists and social scientists,…
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,…
As a method of analyzing and predicting social phenomena using social media as data, we propose a method using a mathematical model of hit phenomenon which is the theory of social physics. I could explain the transition of the number of…
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…