Psychology - Koinophysics

Koinophysics is not an established academic term: it is a coinage of this project, and is presented here explicitly as such, without claiming any genealogy that it does not have. It arises from a specific need within the model: there is a set of mechanismsspread of rumors and beliefs, formation and breaking of trust, panic and euphoria of crowds, quality of deliberation in small groups, charismatic leadership and its collapsethat are modeled with the same type of tools that econophysics and sociophysics already use (thresholds, cascades, network dynamics, systems far from equilibrium), but that do not exclusively belong either to the sphere that is reserved for the economic or to the one that is reserved for the social structural: in fact, four of the six lanes that make up this layer have formal entry or exit ports to both modules at the same time. For that reason it is deliberately kept separate, not as a third parallel module with its own hierarchy, but as a transversal layer that both modules consume without either possessing it - the same role that, within Econophysics, is already fulfilled by transversal modifiers such as Complex Networks or Dynamics and Non-Equilibrium, here elevated to the scale of the entire model.

To name it, we deliberately avoided reusing psychophysics: that term belongs, since 1860, to Gustav Theodor Fechner, who coined it in his work Elemente der Psychophysik to designate the quantitative study of the relationship between the magnitude of a physical stimulus and the magnitude of the subjective sensation it produces in an individual the field that gave rise to the Weber-Fechner law, built on the previous work of Ernst Heinrich Weber from 1834. It is, by definition, a study of the isolated individual facing a stimulus, not of the dynamics of a collective; Using the same name for crowd phenomena, social contagion, or group leadership would have rightly been a historical inaccuracy.

Instead, Koinophysics is built on the Greek root koídos (), "common, shared, belonging to all," from which are derived koinnía (, "community, association, that which is shared") and the modern Greek term koiñotita (), which is translated today precisely as "collectivity." It is the most direct root available in Greek for the concept of "collective dynamics" that this module describes, more precise in that specific sense than ochlos (physical crowd), demos (people/population), or nous (individual mind), none of which cover with the same exactness the idea of "what a group holds in common"a belief, a trust, a leadership, a rumor. Composed with physis following the same morphological pattern as its two predecessors, Koinophysics is then defined as the study of the dynamics of what a human community holds in commonbelief, trust, attention, loyaltythrough the modeling tools of physics.

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