Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userStatistical physics of social dynamics
228
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
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 interactions of individuals as elementary units in social structures. Here we review the state of the art by focusing on a wide list of topics ranging from opinion, cultural and language dynamics to crowd behavior, hierarchy formation, human dynamics, social spreading. We highlight the connections between these problems and other, more traditional, topics of statistical physics. We also emphasize the comparison of model results with empirical data from social systems.
rate research
Read More
Social relationships characterize the interactions that occur within social species and may have an important impact on collective animal motion. Here, we consider a variation of the standard Vicsek model for collective motion in which interactions are mediated by an empirically motivated scale-free topology that represents a heterogeneous pattern of social contacts. We observe that the degree of order of the model is strongly affected by network heterogeneity: more heterogeneous networks show a more resilient ordered state; while less heterogeneity leads to a more fragile ordered state that can be destroyed by sufficient external noise. Our results challenge the previously accepted equivalence between the {em static} Vicsek model and the equilibrium XY model on the network of connections, and point towards a possible equivalence with models exhibiting a different symmetry.
In this work we study a simple compartmental model for drinking behavior evolution. The population is divided in 3 compartments regarding their alcohol consumption, namely Susceptible individuals $S$ (nonconsumers), Moderate drinkers $M$ and Risk drinkers $R$. The transitions among those states are ruled by probabilities. Despite the simplicity of the model, we observed the occurrence of two distinct nonequilibrium phase transitions to absorbing states. One of these states is composed only by Susceptible individuals $S$, with no drinkers ($M=R=0$). On the other hand, the other absorbing state is composed only by Risk drinkers $R$ ($S=M=0$). Between these two steady states, we have the coexistence of the three subpopulations $S$, $M$ and $R$. Comparison with abusive alcohol consumption data for Brazil shows a good agreement between the models results and the database.
Social network based information campaigns can be used for promoting beneficial health behaviours and mitigating polarisation (e.g. regarding climate change or vaccines). Network-based intervention strategies typically rely on full knowledge of network structure. It is largely not possible or desirable to obtain population-level social network data due to availability and privacy issues. It is easier to obtain information about individuals attributes (e.g. age, income), which are jointly informative of an individuals opinions and their social network position. We investigate strategies for influencing the system state in a statistical mechanics based model of opinion formation. Using synthetic and data based examples we illustrate the advantages of implementing coarse-grained influence strategies on Ising models with modular structure in the presence of external fields. Our work provides a scalable methodology for influencing Ising systems on large graphs and the first exploration of the Ising influence problem in the presence of ambient (social) fields. By exploiting the observation that strong ambient fields can simplify control of networked dynamics, our findings open the possibility of efficiently computing and implementing public information campaigns using insights from social network theory without costly or invasive levels of data collection.
In this paper we aim to demonstrate how physical perspective enriches usual statistical analysis when dealing with a complex system of many interacting agents of non-physical origin. To this end, we discuss analysis of urban public transportation networks viewed as complex systems. In such studies, a multi-disciplinary approach is applied by integrating methods in both data processing and statistical physics to investigate the correlation between public transportation network topological features and their operational stability. The studies incorporate concepts of coarse graining and clusterization, universality and scaling, stability and percolation behavior, diffusion and fractal analysis.
We explore a systematic approach to studying the dynamics of evolving networks at a coarse-grained, system level. We emphasize the importance of finding good observables (network properties) in terms of which coarse grained models can be developed. We illustrate our approach through a particular social network model: the rise and fall of a networked society [1]: we implement our low-dimensional description computationally using the equation-free approach and show how it can be used to (a) accelerate simulations and (b) extract system-level stability/bifurcation information from the detailed dynamic model. We discuss other system-level tasks that can be enabled through such a computer-assisted coarse graining approach.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
