Sociology - Sociophysics

The term sociophysics predates econophysics and was coined thirteen years earlier, in 1982, by physicist Serge Galam together with Yuval Gefen and Yonathan Shapir, in the founding article "Sociophysics: A New Approach of Sociological Collective Behavior. I. Mean-Behaviour Description of a Strike", published in The Journal of Mathematical Sociology (vol. 9, no. 1). Like Stanley years later, Galam proposed applying models from the physics of many-body systemsin particular, models inspired by ferromagnetism, such as the Ising modelto collective phenomena that until then were the exclusive territory of sociology, beginning with the dynamics of a strike as a case study. Galam continued to develop the field over the next three decades, extending it to opinion dynamics, coalition formation, and electoral phenomena, and synthesized that work in the book Sociophysics: A Physicist's Modeling of Psycho-Political Phenomena (Springer, 2012)a title that, incidentally, already claimed for sociophysics much of the terrain that we colloquially associate with "the psychological." Morphologically, the name unites the Latin prefix socius ("companion, ally", root of "society") with the Greek physis, in the same construction -physics. Sociophysics designates the study of collective social phenomenaopinion, conflict, cooperation, public orderwith the mathematical tools of statistical physics.

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