János Kertész, Marc Barthelemy, Guido Caldarelli, Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Tiziana Di Matteo, Serge Galam, Marta Gonzales, Yurij Holovatch, Janusz A. Holyst, Sarika Jalan, Hawoong Jeong, Neil F. Johnson, Renaud Lambiotte, Linyuan Lü, Thomas Lux, Rosario N. Mantegna, Matjaz Perc, Jari Saramäki, Michael Small, Misako Takayasu, Taha Yasseri, Wei-Xing Zhou

Social Physics seeks quantitative, empirically testable explanations of collective human behavior. Its name has a long and contested history, but its contemporary program is neither the claim that society is literally a physical system nor an attempt to replace the social sciences with physics. It is an interdisciplinary practice: observation and experimentation, model construction, mathematical and computational analysis, and repeated confrontation with data. The field has been transformed by analyzing digital traces, network science, agent-based modeling, large-scale experiments, and the capacity to study coupled dynamics across economic, social, technological, biological, and physical layers. We review advances in financial analysis and modeling; economic complexity; the structure and evolution of social networks; spreading, opinion, and information dynamics; inequality, cooperation, conflict, mobility, cities, culture, science, and collective behavior; and the emerging study of human-AI ecosystems. Across these domains, common features recur – heterogeneity, interaction, feedback, adaptation, non-equilibrium dynamics, multiscale organization, and emergent collective outcomes. We also confront the limitations that have arisen in this field: convenience samples, platform dependence, weak causal identification, over-universal claims, insufficient engagement with meaning and institutions, privacy risks, and the danger that predictive models become instruments of manipulation. We propose a future Social Physics organized around theory – data reciprocity; causal and generative explanation; measurement validity and cross-context generalization; responsible, participatory data governance; genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration; and reflexive study of interventions and algorithms that alter the systems being observed.

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Rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) have empowered autonomous agents to generate social networks, communicate, and form shared and diverging opinions on political issues. However, our understanding of their collective behaviours and underlying mechanisms remains incomplete. In this paper, we simulate networked systems involving thousands of LLM agents across different backbone models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, ChatGLM, Llama-3, and DeepSeek-V3), in which agents interact through LLM-guided conversations and update their opinions over time, resulting in the emergence of opinion polarization. We discover that these agents spontaneously develop their own social network with properties characteristic of human social networks, such as homophilic clustering. The collective opinions of these LLM agents evolve in ways that exhibit behavioural patterns consistent with social phenomena and mechanisms widely discussed in empirical studies of human behaviour and opinion-dynamics models. This consistency suggests that LLM agents can serve as a valuable synthetic testbed for exploring hypothetical intervention strategies in networked LLM-agent systems. Using this testbed, we further examine the effects of a range of network- and individual-level interventions, such as promoting more diverse interactions and reducing confirmation bias. Overall, this work not only sheds light on subtle opinion dynamics and collective behaviour of LLM agents from a network perspective, but also demonstrates their potential for testing hypotheses about opinion dynamics and intervention strategies.

Jinghua Piao, Zhihong Lu, Chen Gao, Fengli Xu, Qinghua Hu, Fernando P. Santos, Yong Li & James Evans 

Nature Communications (2026)

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Antonio Cabrales, Gema Pomares, David Ramos Muñoz & Ángel Sánchez

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination

We experimentally study a reduced-form network-formation game inspired by Cabrales et al (2024). A set of network agents chooses (i) a privately profitable number of outside projects and (ii) bilateral links with other network agents. Links generate concave private benefits, whereas a partner’s outside projects impose a cost on each of its network neighbors. Because an agent does not internalize the costs that its own projects impose on its partners, the equilibrium benchmark features more projects and fewer network links than the social optimum. In a repeated laboratory experiment with fixed groups, treatment comparisons are broadly consistent with these comparative-static predictions. Exact choices, however, are systematically pulled toward the interior of the feasible action set, especially when the theoretical benchmark lies at a boundary. We interpret the evidence as support for the model’s core cross-layer externality mechanism, rather than as a direct test of a particular banking or supply-chain institution, and discuss learning, stochastic choice, and coordination as possible sources of the quantitative deviations.

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Ollin D. Langle-Chimal, Steffen Knoblauch & Marta C. González 
Nature Communications (2026)

Human mobility in urban areas largely depends on the spatial distribution of jobs and who pursues them, yet how workers balance proximity against economic opportunity remains poorly understood. Existing mechanistic models capture physically interpretable effects such as distance decay, but overlook how socioeconomic factors shape commuting decisions. We present WorkReach, a model grounded in discrete choice theory that embeds informality and economic complexity into a utility function and represents commuting as the outcome of workers behaving as if maximizing it. Applied to four cities in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, it reproduces commuting flows as accurately as widely used benchmarks while making the underlying choices interpretable. Here, we show that workers consistently commute farther to economically sophisticated areas, while the role of informality differs across regions, and that measuring accessibility by the perceived benefit of opportunities, not just physical proximity, highlights disparities conventional metrics overlook.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com