Towards understanding of the social hysteresis – insights from statistical physics and surprises

Hysteresis, a phenomenon in which the response of a system lags behind and depends on its past history, has been used to understand various psycho-social phenomena, including abrupt shifts in opinion dynamics, political polarization, and more . As physicists, we know that hysteresis is associated with first-order (discontinuous) phase transitions. This has led us to understand what factors support discontinuous phase transitions in models of opinion dynamics. We have been working on this topic for many years, mainly in the context of the q-voter model, which is particularly attractive from both a theoretical and a social point of view. In this talk, I will summarize our work, which is still ongoing. I will briefly discuss which results are particularly interesting from a social point of view, but I will mainly focus on those that surprised us as physicists.



Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87184656701?pwd=1Tbf0whItoqaZjimgXmSKhQaKnRnoR.1