Sociophysics
Under sociophysics (including social physics ) is the idea and its applications, is that social scenarios according to the nature of scientific models can conceptualize.
history
The idea first appeared among French materialists in the 18th century.
Around 1800, when the various domains of knowledge were not yet so strongly separated, there were several, primarily literary, attempts to find the "strange correspondence between the phenomena of the physical and the moral world", as described in Heinrich von Kleist's On the Gradual Manufacture of Thoughts To talk is to explore. Examples include Achim von Arnim's novel Hollin's Liebeleben , Das Käthchen von Heilbronn , Kleist's Der Foundling or, most prominently, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's The Elective Affinities .
While the German tradition of social sciences tended to take up the hermeneutical tradition, sociophysical ideas were more often taken up in the French tradition of sociology , which was more positively oriented. The circle around Auguste Comte (who does not join the scientistic worldview) or Quetelet should be mentioned here . The reception of Émile Durkheim , in whose social facts sociophysics is involved, gives rise to structural functionalism . Corresponding schools of thought are often relevant to this day for questions of social construction and research paradigms (e.g. principles of falsificationism according to Popper or critical theory ) in sociology, psychology and other social and behavioral sciences.
Present; typical problems
“Sociophysics” in the more recent linguistic usage is an interdisciplinary research field that emerged in the early 1990s, the focus of which is on the description of social, economic ( eco- physics), cultural and political phenomena using physical and mathematical-statistical methods. It is related to the development of chaos theory from the late 1970s, when the Santa Fe Institute in particular dealt with applications to social phenomena. The attempts of Hermann Haken to establish an interdisciplinary new subject, which he called synergetics , go further back . The work of Wolfgang Weidlich also comes from this school, which today has merged with the further development of chaos theory in the theory of cooperative and emergent phenomena. There are also other precursors such as the applied mathematician Elliott W. Montroll , whose work dates back to the 1950s. During and after the Second World War, disciplines such as Operations Research and Game Theory emerged , which found broad interdisciplinary applications, especially in military research during the Cold War (for example at the Rand Corporation ).
- In general, such an approach is based on the idea that complex social systems consist of a large number of actors who act independently of one another, but that these actors are not completely free in their actions, but rather follow rational considerations and / or are restricted in their actions by social framework conditions. In physics, such a system is treated as a many-particle system , which is subject to certain constraints and can be investigated using the means of statistical mechanics and special diagrammatic methods of high-energy physics . By abstracting such systems and examining them with the tools of physics and mathematics, statements about structures and symmetries in social systems can be found and shown.
- An example of a basic sociophysical problem is the “growth of cities”. While mathematicians like Pareto, for example , have formulated laws relating to the relationship between urban and rural populations, sociophysicists deal with the spatial arrangement and territorial expansion of urban areas. It was observed that z. B. Considered on a large scale, transport networks in cities have universal fractal structures, as they appear in the vicinity of phase transitions in physical systems.
- The temporal analysis of traffic data on European "motorway networks" in connection with the massive use of computer simulations have for example provided information about the development and extent of traffic jams. These findings were used as the basis for avoiding them or for quickly eliminating them. The so-called "panic research" deals with similar problems. Similar to “traffic research”, it is specifically about human lives that are not only endangered by accidents and pile-ups, but also B. also through panics in football stadiums and other major events. How can one effectively prevent such "disturbances" - traffic jams, collisions and panics?
- With the method of computer simulation in connection with sociophysics, it was possible to describe possible collective behavioral patterns of a large number of mutually influencing individuals (so-called “ agents ” and “ cellular automata ”). Sociophysics borrows from the mathematics of game theory .
- Further significant problems that are dealt with in sociophysics concern the formation of various "relations" between users in the Internet and the aforementioned fractal structures in such networks, especially in the formation (and propagation) of disruptive events. That means, it goes here u. a. about the security of such networks in the event of failure of individual connections and especially about the global behavior of the Internet.
See also
- Cohesion (psychology)
- Spatial sociology , urban sociology , spatial planning
- Social geography , human geography , topological change
- Social psychology
- Social Engineering (Political Science)
- Social network (systems theory)
- Social darwinism
Literature selection
- Wolfgang Weidlich : Physics and Social Science - the approach of Synergetics. Physics Reports, Volume 204, 1991, pp. 1-163. (The article deals with aspects of theoretical physics relevant to sociology using many concrete examples.)
- Dietrich Stauffer and colleagues: Biology, Sociology, Geology by Computational Physics. 2006. ISBN 978-0-444-56064-3 . (This book shows especially well that physical methods are also viable in a similar way in subjects other than sociology.)
- Mark Buchanan : Why the rich keep getting richer and your neighbor looks like you. New findings from social physics. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-593-38456-6 (original title The Social Atom ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jürgen Ritsert: The Positivism Controversy. In: Georg Kneer and Stephan Moebius (eds.): Sociological controversies. Contributions to Another History of the Science of the Social. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-29548-9 ( Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. 1948), pp. 103f.
- ↑ Max Rauner: Network Research: This is how we tick . In: Spiegel Online . December 26, 2009.