Sociophysics is a scientific field that uses concepts and mathematical methods from physics to understand the behaviour of groups of people. Methods are drawn from statistical physics, thermodynamics, mechanics and field theory and applied to economics, crowd dynamics, changes of opinion, groups of interacting populations etc. Sociomechanics is within the field of sociophysics.

Sociophysics is sometimes called social physics. It overlaps with mathematical sociology, population modelling, mathematical biology, and cliodynamics (dynamical modelling of history). It draws on methods from agent-based modelling, non-linear systems, stochastic systems and computer simulation.

References

Coleman, J.S., 1964. Introduction to mathematical sociology. The Free Press of Glencoe.

Turchin, P., 2003. Historical dynamics: Why states rise and fall. Princeton, NJ.

Chakrabarti, B.K., Chakraborti, A. and Chatterjee, A. eds., 2007. Econophysics and sociophysics: Trends and perspectives. John Wiley & Sons.

Castellano, C., Fortunato, S. and Loreto, V., 2009. Statistical physics of social dynamics. Reviews of modern physics, 81(2), p.591.

Galam, S., 2012. Sociophysics: A physicist’s modeling of psycho-political phenomena. Springer Science & Business Media.

Sen, P. and Chakrabarti, B.K., 2013. Sociophysics: An introduction. Oxford University Press.

Schweitzer, F., 2018. Sociophysics. Physics Today, 71(2), pp.40-46.