Social Complexity Articles

Sociocultural evolution describes the process of evolution as it acts on macro-scale social systems of all kind. Sociocultural evolution through a process of variation, selection, and duplication of social structures and cultural constructs leads over time to create complexity

A social adaptive landscape is a model to social systems that tries to map out the entire environment within which individuals, social groups or societies are interacting and adapting to each other's behavior as they try to find optimal solutions to a given social context.

The study of network diffusion tries to capture the underlying mechanism of how events propagate through a complex network.

Community structure refers to the local structures that form within social networks as some agents interact more frequently and intensely forming specific substructures within the overall network. 

Social attractors define a specific subset of states that a social system may take, which corresponds to its normal behavior towards which it will naturally gravitate. 

Social feedback loops describe a relationship within a social system where events feedback on themselves to create relationships of interdependence where different events work to balance each other or amplify each other.

Social Complexity is the study of nonlinear social processes through the use of models from complexity theory combined with computational methods

A social system is a set of individuals and relations between them through which they form part of some interdependent organization as a whole.

Social institutions are a central object of study within the social sciences, they represent enduring patterns of organization or structures built up around some social function, religions, governments, and families are all institutions that have stood the test of

Social interdependence theory is a social theory which holds that social systems are primarily defined by the type of interdependencies between their members.

In the social sciences, agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. Agency is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes.

Within any given social system a number of collective functions need to be performed for the system to be maintained and develop over time, these functions might include, basic biological reproduction of the population, for which we have the institution of the family, or economic functions such as manufacturing products, for which we have businesses or political functions such as collective social decision making for which we have the institution of government.

In the social sciences, social structures are the patterns of social arrangement in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions and relations between agents, as enduring patterns of behavior and interaction they define some form of order to the overall system.

Self-organization is a type of pattern formation, a means through which some form of order or coordination is developed. There are essentially just two basic methods through which social coordination and order can occur.

A social network is an abstract representation of a social system in terms of its relations and structure of connectivity. The basic constituents of a social graph are nodes and edges, nodes are people or groups of people, edges - also called ties - represent the relationships between these social actors, which can come in many different kinds, such as friendship, kinship, colleague etc.

Social network structure describes the makeup of the overall social network. There are a number of major factors shaping the overall make-up to a social network including the density of connections being a primary factor as it tells us how connected an agent is on average;  the average path length is a second key overall metric as it tells us how close together any two agents are on average.

Social dynamics is the study of how social systems change over time, with a focus on macro, recurring patterns of change that emerge out of the local interactions between agents.

Social network analysis is the application of network theory to the modeling and analysis of social systems. It combines both tools for analyzing social relations and theory for explaining the structures that emerge from distributed social interactions.

Social resilience refers to the adaptive capacity, of a social system of any kind - from whole societies to individuals - to deal with change within their environment while maintaining and preserving critical structure and functionality.