Statistical physics of social dynamics

TL;DR

This paper reviews how statistical physics models are applied to understand various social phenomena, highlighting recent advances, connections to traditional physics, and comparisons with empirical data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the application of statistical physics to social dynamics, emphasizing recent developments and empirical validation.

Findings

Models successfully describe opinion and cultural dynamics.

Connections established between social phenomena and traditional physics topics.

Empirical data supports the validity of the models.

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.