How good ideas spread: the lessons from a new science
Social physics
or
sociophysics
is a field of science which uses mathematical tools inspired by
physics
to understand the behavior of human crowds. In a modern commercial use, it can also refer to the analysis of social phenomena with
big data
.
Social physics is closely related to
econophysics
, which uses physics methods to describe
economics
.
[1]
History
[
edit
]
The earliest mentions of a concept of social physics began with the English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes
. In 1636 he traveled to
Florence
, Italy, and met physicist-astronomer
Galileo Galilei
, known for his contributions to the study of motion.
[2]
It was here that Hobbes began to outline the idea of representing the "physical phenomena" of society in terms of the laws of motion.
[2]
In his treatise
De Corpore
, Hobbes sought to relate the movement of "material bodies"
[3]
to the mathematical terms of motion outlined by Galileo and similar scientists of the time period. Although there was no explicit mention of "social physics", the sentiment of examining society with scientific methods began before the first written mention of social physics.
Later, French social thinker
Henri de Saint-Simon
’s first book, the 1803
Lettres d’un Habitant de Geneve
, introduced the idea of describing society using laws similar to those of the physical and biological sciences.
[4]
His student and collaborator was
Auguste Comte
, a French philosopher widely regarded as the founder of
sociology
, who first defined the term in an essay appearing in
Le Producteur
, a journal project by Saint-Simon.
[4]
Comte defined social physics:
Social physics is that science which occupies itself with social phenomena, considered in the same light as astronomical, physical, chemical, and physiological phenomena, that is to say as being subject to natural and invariable laws, the discovery of which is the special object of its researches.
After Saint-Simon and Comte, Belgian statistician
Adolphe Quetelet
, proposed that society be modeled using
mathematical probability
and
social statistics
. Quetelet's 1835 book,
Essay on Social Physics: Man and the Development of his Faculties
, outlines the project of a social physics characterized by measured variables that follow a
normal distribution
, and collected data about many such variables.
[5]
A frequently repeated anecdote is that when Comte discovered that Quetelet had appropriated the term "social physics", he found it necessary to invent a new term, "
sociologie
" ("
sociology
") because he disagreed with Quetelet's collection of statistics.
There have been several “generations” of social physicists.
[6]
The first generation began with Saint-Simon, Comte, and Quetelet, and ended with the late 1800s with historian
Henry Adams
. In the middle of the 20th century, researchers such as the American astrophysicist
John Q. Stewart
and Swedish geographer
Reino Ajo
,
[7]
who showed that the spatial distribution of social interactions could be described using gravity models. Physicists such as
Arthur Iberall
use a
homeokinetics
approach to study social systems as complex self-organizing systems.
[8]
[9]
For example, a homeokinetics analysis of society shows that one must account for flow variables such as the flow of energy, of materials, of action, reproduction rate, and value-in-exchange.
[10]
More recently there have been a large number of social science papers that use mathematics broadly similar to that of
physics
, and described as “
computational social science
”.
[11]
In the late 1800s, Adams separated “human physics” into the subsets of social physics or social mechanics (sociology of interactions using physics-like mathematical tools)
[12]
and social thermodynamics or sociophysics (sociology described using mathematical invariances similar to those in
thermodynamics
).
[13]
This dichotomy is roughly analogous to the difference between
microeconomics
and
macroeconomics
.
Examples
[
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]
Ising model and voter dynamics
[
edit
]
One of the most well-known examples in social physics is the relationship of the
Ising model
and the voting dynamics of a finite population. The Ising model, as a model of
ferromagnetism
, is represented by a grid of spaces, each of which is occupied by a
Spin (physics)
, numerically ±1. Mathematically, the final energy state of the system depends on the interactions of the spaces and their respective spins. For example, if two adjacent spaces share the same spin, the surrounding neighbors will begin to align,
[
citation needed
]
and the system will eventually reach a state of consensus. In social physics, it has been observed that voter dynamics in a finite population obey the same mathematical properties of the Ising model. In the social physics model, each spin denotes an opinion, e.g. yes or no, and each space represents a "voter".
[
citation needed
]
If two adjacent spaces (voters) share the same spin (opinion), their neighbors begin to align with their spin value; if two adjacent spaces do not share the same spin, then their neighbors remain the same.
[14]
Eventually, the remaining voters will reach a state of consensus as the "information flows outward".
[14]
The
Sznajd model
is an extension of the Ising model and is classified as an
econophysics
model. It emphasizes the alignment of the neighboring spins in a phenomenon called "
social validation
".
[15]
It follows the same properties as the Ising model and is extended to observe the patterns of opinion dynamics as a whole, rather than focusing on just voter dynamics.
Potts model and cultural dynamics
[
edit
]
The
Potts model
is a generalization of the Ising model and has been used to examine the concept of cultural dissemination as described by American political scientist
Robert Axelrod
. Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination states that individuals who share cultural characteristics are more likely to interact with each other, thus increasing the number of overlapping characteristics and expanding their interaction network.
[16]
The Potts model has the caveat that each spin can hold multiple values, unlike the Ising model that could only hold one value.
[17]
[18]
[19]
Each spin, then, represents an individual's "cultural characteristics... [or] in Axelrod’s words, 'the set of individual attributes that are subject to social influence'".
[19]
It is observed that, using the mathematical properties of the Potts model, neighbors whose cultural characteristics overlap tend to interact more frequently than with unlike neighbors, thus leading to a self-organizing grouping of similar characteristics.
[18]
[17]
Simulations done on the Potts model both show Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination agrees with the Potts model as an Ising-class model.
[18]
Recent work
[
edit
]
In modern use “social physics” refers to using “
big data
” analysis and the mathematical laws to understand the behavior of human crowds.
[20]
The core idea is that data about human activity (e.g., phone call records, credit card purchases, taxi rides, web activity) contain mathematical patterns that are characteristic of how social interactions spread and converge. These mathematical invariances can then serve as a filter for analysis of behavior changes and for detecting emerging behavioral patterns.
[21]
Social physics has recently been applied to analyze the
COVID-19
pandemics
.
[22]
It has been demonstrated that the large difference in the spread of COVID-19 between countries is due to differences in responses to
social stress
. The combination of
traditional epidemic models
with social physics models of the classical
general adaptation syndrome
triad, "anxiety-resistance-exhaustion", accurately describes the first two waves of the COVID-19 epidemic for 13 countries.
[22]
The differences between countries are concentrated in two kinetic constants: the rate of mobilization and the rate of exhaustion.
Recent books about social physics include
MIT
Professor
Alex Pentland
’s book
Social Physics
[23]
or
Nature
editor
Mark Buchanan
’s book
The Social Atom
.
[24]
Popular reading about sociophysics include English physicist
Philip Ball
’s
Why Society is a Complex Matter
,
[25]
Dirk Helbing
's
The Automation of Society is next
or American physicist
Laszlo Barabasi
’s book
Linked
.
[26]
See also
[
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]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Tsekov, Roumen (2023). "Social Thermodynamics 2.0".
arXiv
:
2307.05984
.
- ^
a
b
Robertson, George Croom (1911).
"Hobbes, Thomas"
.
Encyclopædia Britannica
. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). pp. 545?552.
- ^
Duncan, Stewart (2021),
"Thomas Hobbes"
, in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.),
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Spring 2021 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University
, retrieved
2021-02-24
- ^
a
b
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".
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.
JSTOR
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.
- ^
Quetelet, Adolphe (1835).
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[
Essay on Social Physics: Man and the Development of his Faculties
] (in French). Vol. 1?2. Paris: Imprimeur-Libraire.
- ^
Iberall, Arthur (1984) [Presented at Annual Conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC), Syracuse, May 1980]. "Contributions to a Physical Science for the Study of Civilizations".
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- ^
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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.
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- ^
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, Medfield, MA: Strong Voices Publishing,
ISBN
978-0-990-53614-7
- ^
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Science
2010
- ^
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(PDF)
.
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.
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.
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.
- ^
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.
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.
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.
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b
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.
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.
- ^
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
- ^
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.
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.
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.
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b
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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b
c
Gandica, Y.; Medina, E.; Bonalde, I. (2013-12-15).
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
- ^
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b
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.
- ^
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.
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- ^
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.
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a
b
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
PMID
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.
- ^
Pentland, Alex (2014).
Social physics: how good ideas spread: the lessons from a new science
. New York, USA: The Penguin Press.
ISBN
978-1-59420-565-1
.
- ^
Buchanan, Mark (2007).
The Social Atom - why the Rich get Richer, Cheaters get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You
. Bloomsbury USA. pp. x?xi.
ISBN
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.
- ^
Ball, Philip (2012).
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. Springer.
- ^
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo (2002).
Linked: The New Science of Networks
. Perseus Books Group.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Arnopoulos, Paris
,
Sociophysics, Cosmos and Chaos in Nature and Culture
, New York, Nova Science Publishers Inc., 1st ed. 1995, 2nd ed. 2005.
- Ball, Philip
,
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
, 2004,
ISBN
0-434-01135-5
.