Ideal Social Gas

TL;DR

This paper models social phenomena using an analogy with ideal gases in physics, applying statistical mechanics to derive societal quantities from individual behaviors, with a focus on the implications of a position-dependent social particle mass.

Contribution

It introduces a novel social modeling framework based on the ideal gas model, incorporating a position-dependent mass for social particles, bridging physics and social science.

Findings

Social phenomena can be modeled as an ideal gas.

The approach allows derivation of societal quantities from individual behavior.

Concepts from physics translate reasonably to social contexts.

Abstract

This work continues the one commenced in a previous one, where the key idea is that individual stances on a social matter can be modeled as positions of particles in physics. Here, we explore the aggregation of individual behavior as a microscopic model of social phenomena to obtain quantities characterizing a society as a whole, similar to the resulting thermodynamical quantities at the macroscopic scale. We follow the theoretical framework of statistical mechanics with a Boltzmann distribution. Notwithstanding the fact that the translation of physical concepts need to be adequately motivated, a key distinction with respect to the physical case is that a social particle has a position-dependent mass. From such a generalization we obtain a simple example to illustrate the possibilities of such an approach based on the ideal gas model in physics. As a result, we find that the social phenomena can be modeled as a gas under the assumptions considered here. We discuss how several concepts and their relations reasonably translate from physical to social phenomena.