Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Social Physics seeks quantitative, empirically testable explanations of collective human behavior. Its name has a long and contested history, but its contemporary program is neither the claim that society is literally a physical system nor an attempt to replace the social sciences with physics. It is an interdisciplinary practice: observation and experimentation, model construction, mathematical and computational analysis, and repeated confrontation with data. The field has been transformed by analyzing digital traces, network science, agent-based modeling, large-scale experiments, and the capacity to study coupled dynamics across economic, social, technological, biological, and physical layers. We review advances in financial analysis and modeling; economic complexity; the structure and evolution of social networks; spreading, opinion, and information dynamics; inequality, cooperation, conflict, mobility, cities, culture, science, and collective behavior; and the emerging study of human-AI ecosystems. Across these domains, common features recur - heterogeneity, interaction, feedback, adaptation, non-equilibrium dynamics, multiscale organization, and emergent collective outcomes. We also confront the limitations that have arisen in this field: convenience samples, platform dependence, weak causal identification, over-universal claims, insufficient engagement with meaning and institutions, privacy risks, and the danger that predictive models become instruments of manipulation. We propose a future Social Physics organized around theory - data reciprocity; causal and generative explanation; measurement validity and cross-context generalization; responsible, participatory data governance; genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration; and reflexive study of interventions and algorithms that alter the systems being observed.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Kertész, János, Barthelemy, Marc, Caldarelli, Guido, Chakrabarti, Bikas K., Di Matteo, Tiziana, Galam, Serge, Gonzales, Marta, Holovatch, Yurij, Holyst, Janusz A., Jalan, Sarika, Jeong, Hawoong, Johnson, Neil F., Lambiotte, Renaud, Lü, Linyuan, Lux, Thomas, Mantegna, Rosario N., Perc, Matjaz, Saramäki, Jari, Small, Michael, Takayasu, Misako, Yasseri, Taha, Zhou, Wei-Xing
Institutions: Central European University, Université Paris-Saclay, Institut de Physique Théorique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives, Institute for Complex Systems, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Centre de Recherches Politiques de Sciences Po, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Yukhnovskii Institute for Condensed Matter Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Warsaw University of Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, George Washington University, University of Oxford, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, University of Palermo, University of Maribor, Aalto University, The University of Western Australia, Institute of Science Tokyo, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Trinity College Dublin, East China University of Science and Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221054065