Statistical physics of social dynamics (original) (raw)
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Statistical physics models of social systems with a large number of members, each interacting with a subset of others, have been used in very diverse domains such as culture dynamics, crowd behavior, information dissemination and social conflicts. We observe that such models rely on the fact that large societal groups display surprising regularities despite individual agency. Unlike physics phenomena that obey Newton’s third law, in the world of humans the magnitudes of action and reaction are not necessarily equal. The effect of the actions of group n on group m can differ from the effect of group m on group n. We thus use the spin language to describe humans with this observation in mind. Note that particular individual behaviors do not survive in statistical averages. Only common characteristics remain. We have studied two-group conflicts as well as three-group conflicts. We have used time-dependent Mean-Field Theory and Monte Carlo simulations. Each group is defined by two param...
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