For cooperation to evolve, some mechanism must limit the rate at which cooperators are exposed to defectors. Only then can the advantages of mutual cooperation outweigh the costs of being exploited. Although researchers widely agree on this, they disagree intensely about which evolutionary...

Today’s strongly connected, global networks have produced highly interdependent systems that we do not understand and cannot control well. These systems are vulnerable to failure at all scales, posing serious threats to society, even when external shocks are absent. As the complexity and...

Many large-scale disasters have a strong human component. They cannot be solved by technical approaches alone, but require an understanding of the collective social dynamics. This is maybe most obvious for financial crises, famines and other shortages of resources, epidemic spreading of...

Our society is fundamentally changing. These days, almost nothing works without a computer chip. Processing power doubles every 18 months and will exceed the capabilities of human brains in about ten years from now. Some time ago, IBM's Big Blue computer already beat the best chess player....

We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do not provide a good picture of the actual system behavior,...

We develop an analytical core for sociology. We follow standard dynamical systems theory by first specifying the conditions for social equilibrium, and then study the dynamical principles that govern disequilibrium behavior. Our general social equilibrium model is an expansion of the general...

According to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan [1651; 2008 (Touchstone, New York), English Ed], "the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," and it would need powerful social institutions to establish social order. In reality, however, social cooperation can also arise spontaneously,...

The Mexican wave, or La Ola, which rose to fame during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, surges through the rows of spectators in a stadium as those in one section leap to their feet with their arms up, and then sit down again as the next section rises to repeat the motion. To interpret and quantify...

One of the most disastrous forms of collective human behaviour is the kind of crowd stampede induced by panic, often leading to fatalities as people are crushed or trampled. Sometimes this behaviour is triggered in life threatening situations such as fires in crowded buildings; at other times,...

Nowadays the complexity of logistics is a buzzword spreading in business, media and everyday practice. However, the study of logistics networks from the point of view of complex dynamical systems theory has started only recently. In the past decade, physicists have been more and more interested...