Related papers: How many more is different?
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…
How does the size of a swarm affect its collective action? Despite being arguably a key parameter, no systematic and satisfactory guiding principles exist to select the number of units required for a given task and environment. Even when…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and while it…
Social insects are ecologically and evolutionarily most successful organisms on earth, which can achieve robust collective behaviors through local interactions among group members. Colony migration has been considered as a leading example…
Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…
We report on two series of experiments, conducted in the frame of two different collaborations designed to study how pedestrians adapt their trajectories and velocities in groups or crowds. Strong emphasis is put on the motivations for the…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
We develop a mathematical model to describe the persistence of rule-breaking behaviors in societies, such as traffic violations, disregard for legal restrictions and other forms of noncompliance. Using a replicator-type dynamics with…
We have numerically studied the trapping problem in a two-dimensional lattice where particles are continuously generated. We have introduced interaction between particles and directionality of their movement. This model presents a critical…
A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…
Social fragmentation transition is a transition of social states between many disconnected communities with distinct opinions and a well-connected single network with homogeneous opinions. This is a timely research topic with high relevance…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
Large populations of globally-coupled identical maps subjected to independent additive noise are shown to undergo qualitative changes as the features of the stochastic process are varied. We show that for strong coupling, the collective…
To uncover underlying mechanism of collective human dynamics, we survey more than 1.8 billion blog entries and observe the statistical properties of word appearances. We focus on words that show dynamic growth and decay with a tendency to…
Critical transitions, or large changes in the state of a system after a small change in the system's external conditions or parameters, commonly occur in a wide variety of disciplines, from the biological and social sciences to physics.…
An important challenge in several disciplines is to understand how sudden changes can propagate among coupled systems. Examples include the synchronization of business cycles, population collapse in patchy ecosystems, markets shifting to a…
Understanding and modeling the dynamics of pedestrian crowds can help with designing and increasing the safety of civil facilities. A key feature of crowds is its intrinsic stochasticity, appearing even under very diluted conditions, due to…
As learning systems increasingly shape everyday decisions, Algorithmic Collective Action (ACA), i.e., users coordinating changes to shared data to steer model behavior, offers a complement to regulator-side policy and corporate model…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…