All beauty, richness and harmony in the emergent dynamics of a complex system largely
depend on the specific way in which its elementary components interact. The last twenty-five …

The Matthew effect describes the phenomenon that in societies, the rich tend to get richer
and the potent even more powerful. It is closely related to the concept of preferential …

A longstanding problem in the social, biological, and computational sciences is to determine
how groups of distributed individuals can form intelligent collective judgments. Since …

Statistical physics has proven to be a fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the
realm of traditional physics. Recent years have witnessed an attempt by physicists to study …

Networks of interconnected nodes have long played a key role in Cognitive Science, from
artificial neural networks to spreading activation models of semantic memory. Recently …

How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This
question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology, and cognitive science. Previous …

We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a
small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the …

Many of the most important properties of human groups–including properties that may give
one group an evolutionary advantage over another–are properly defined only at the level of …

The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for
centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science …

The paper surveys recent research on language evolution, focusing in particular on models
of cultural evolution and how they are being developed and tested using agent-based …