Sociophysics models inspired by the Ising model

TL;DR

This review discusses how Ising and Ising-like models have been adapted to understand collective social phenomena such as opinion dynamics, financial markets, and epidemic spreading, highlighting their ability to capture phase transitions and consensus formation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the application of Ising-inspired models across various sociophysical systems, emphasizing their universality and dynamical rules.

Findings

Models capture phase transitions and critical phenomena in social systems.

Ising-like models successfully describe consensus and segregation.

Dynamical rules influence the universality class of social models.

Abstract

The Ising model, originally developed for understanding magnetic phase transitions, has become a cornerstone in the study of collective phenomena across diverse disciplines. In this review, we explore how Ising and Ising-like models have been successfully adapted to sociophysical systems, where binary-state agents mimic human decisions or opinions. By focusing on key areas such as opinion dynamics, financial markets, social segregation, game theory, language evolution, and epidemic spreading, we demonstrate how the models describing these phenomena, inspired by the Ising model, capture essential features of collective behavior, including phase transitions, consensus formation, criticality, and metastability. In particular, we emphasize the role of the dynamical rules of evolution in the different models that often converge back to Ising-like universality. We end by outlining the future directions in sociphysics research, highlighting the continued relevance of the Ising model in the analysis of complex social systems.