Computational sociology

Computational sociology is a branch of sociology that uses computationally intensive

methods to analyze and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial
intelligence, complex statistical methods, and analytic approaches like social network analysis,
computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through
bottom-up modeling of social interactions.[1]

It involves the understanding of social agents, the interaction among these agents, and the
effect of these interactions on the social aggregate.[2] Although the subject matter and
methodologies in social science differ from those in natural science or computer science,
several of the approaches used in contemporary social simulation originated from fields such
as physics and artificial intelligence.[3][4] Some of the approaches that originated in this field
have been imported into the natural sciences, such as measures of network centrality from the
fields of social network analysis and network science.

In relevant literature, computational sociology is often related to the study of social

complexity.[5] Social complexity concepts such as complex systems, non-linear interconnection
among macro and micro process, and emergence, have entered the vocabulary of
computational sociology.[6] A practical and well-known example is the construction of a
computational model in the form of an "artificial society", by which researchers can analyze the
structure of a social system.[2][7]

Contents
History
Background
Systems theory and structural functionalism
Macrosimulation and microsimulation
Cellular automata and agent-based modeling
Data mining and social network analysis
Computational content analysis
Challenges
Levels and their interactions
Culture modeling
Experimentation and evaluation
Model choice and model complexities
Generative models
Heterogeneous or ensemble models
Impact
 Impact on science
Impact on society
See also
References
External links
Journals and academic publications
Associations, conferences and workshops
Academic programs, departments and degrees
Centers and institutes
North America
South America
Asia
Europe

History

Background

In the past four decades, computational

sociology has been introduced and gaining
popularity. This has been used primarily for
modeling or building explanations of social
processes and are depending on the emergence
of complex behavior from simple activities.[8]
The idea behind emergence is that properties of
Historical map of research paradigms and
any bigger system do not always have to be
associated scientists in sociology and complexity
properties of the components that the system is
science.
made of.[9] The people responsible for the
introduction of the idea of emergence are
Alexander, Morgan, and Broad, who were
classical emergentists. The time at which these emergentists came up with this concept and
method was during the time of the early twentieth century. The aim of this method was to find
a good enough accommodation between two different and extreme ontologies, which were
reductionist materialism and dualism.[8]

While emergence has had a valuable and important role with the foundation of Computational
Sociology, there are those who do not necessarily agree. One major leader in the field, Epstein,
doubted the use because there were aspects that are unexplainable. Epstein put up a claim
against emergentism, in which he says it "is precisely the generative sufficiency of the parts
that constitutes the whole's explanation".[8]
Agent-based models have had a historical influence on Computational Sociology. These models
first came around in the 1960s, and were used to simulate control and feedback processes in
organizations, cities, etc. During the 1970s, the application introduced the use of individuals as
the main units for the analyses and used bottom-up strategies for modeling behaviors. The last
wave occurred in the 1980s. At this time, the models were still bottom-up; the only difference is
that the agents interact interdependently.[8]

Systems theory and structural functionalism

In the post-war era, Vannevar Bush's differential analyser, John von Neumann's cellular
automata, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, and Claude Shannon's information theory became
influential paradigms for modeling and understanding complexity in technical systems. In
response, scientists in disciplines such as physics, biology, electronics, and economics began to
articulate a general theory of systems in which all natural and physical phenomena are
manifestations of interrelated elements in a system that has common patterns and properties.
Following Émile Durkheim's call to analyze complex modern society sui generis,[10] post-war
structural functionalist sociologists such as Talcott Parsons seized upon these theories of
systematic and hierarchical interaction among constituent components to attempt to generate
grand unified sociological theories, such as the AGIL paradigm.[11] Sociologists such as George
Homans argued that sociological theories should be formalized into hierarchical structures of
propositions and precise terminology from which other propositions and hypotheses could be
derived and operationalized into empirical studies.[12] Because computer algorithms and
programs had been used as early as 1956 to test and validate mathematical theorems, such as
the four color theorem,[13] some scholars anticipated that similar computational approaches
could "solve" and "prove" analogously formalized problems and theorems of social structures
and dynamics.

Macrosimulation and microsimulation

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, social scientists used increasingly available computing
technology to perform macro-simulations of control and feedback processes in organizations,
industries, cities, and global populations. These models used differential equations to predict
population distributions as holistic functions of other systematic factors such as inventory
control, urban traffic, migration, and disease transmission.[14][15] Although simulations of
social systems received substantial attention in the mid-1970s after the Club of Rome
published reports predicting that policies promoting exponential economic growth would
eventually bring global environmental catastrophe,[16] the inconvenient conclusions led many
authors to seek to discredit the models, attempting to make the researchers themselves appear
unscientific.[2][17] Hoping to avoid the same fate, many social scientists turned their attention
toward micro-simulation models to make forecasts and study policy effects by modeling
aggregate changes in state of individual-level entities rather than the changes in distribution at
the population level.[18] However, these micro-simulation models did not permit individuals to
interact or adapt and were not intended for basic theoretical research.[1]
Cellular automata and agent-based modeling

The 1970s and 1980s were also a time when physicists and mathematicians were attempting to
model and analyze how simple component units, such as atoms, give rise to global properties,
such as complex material properties at low temperatures, in magnetic materials, and within
turbulent flows.[19] Using cellular automata, scientists were able to specify systems consisting
of a grid of cells in which each cell only occupied some finite states and changes between states
were solely governed by the states of immediate neighbors. Along with advances in artificial
intelligence and microcomputer power, these methods contributed to the development of
"chaos theory" and "complexity theory" which, in turn, renewed interest in understanding
complex physical and social systems across disciplinary boundaries.[2] Research organizations
explicitly dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of complexity were also founded in this era:
the Santa Fe Institute was established in 1984 by scientists based at Los Alamos National
Laboratory and the BACH group at the University of Michigan likewise started in the mid-
1980s.

This cellular automata paradigm gave rise to a third wave of social simulation emphasizing
agent-based modeling. Like micro-simulations, these models emphasized bottom-up designs
but adopted four key assumptions that diverged from microsimulation: autonomy,
interdependency, simple rules, and adaptive behavior.[1] Agent-based models are less
concerned with predictive accuracy and instead emphasize theoretical development.[20] In
1981, mathematician and political scientist Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologist W.D.
Hamilton published a major paper in Science titled "The Evolution of Cooperation" which used
an agent-based modeling approach to demonstrate how social cooperation based upon
reciprocity can be established and stabilized in a prisoner's dilemma game when agents
followed simple rules of self-interest.[21] Axelrod and Hamilton demonstrated that individual
agents following a simple rule set of (1) cooperate on the first turn and (2) thereafter replicate
the partner's previous action were able to develop "norms" of cooperation and sanctioning in
the absence of canonical sociological constructs such as demographics, values, religion, and
culture as preconditions or mediators of cooperation.[4] Throughout the 1990s, scholars like
William Sims Bainbridge, Kathleen Carley, Michael Macy, and John Skvoretz developed multi-
agent-based models of generalized reciprocity, prejudice, social influence, and organizational
information processing. In 1999, Nigel Gilbert published the first textbook on Social
Simulation: Simulation for the social scientist and established its most relevant journal: the
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.

Data mining and social network analysis

Independent from developments in computational models of social systems, social network

analysis emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from advances in graph theory, statistics, and studies
of social structure as a distinct analytical method and was articulated and employed by
sociologists like James S. Coleman, Harrison White, Linton Freeman, J. Clyde Mitchell, Mark
Granovetter, Ronald Burt, and Barry Wellman.[22] The increasing pervasiveness of computing
and telecommunication technologies throughout the 1980s and 1990s demanded analytical
techniques, such as network analysis and multilevel modeling, that could scale to increasingly
complex and large data sets. The most recent wave of computational sociology, rather than
employing simulations, uses network analysis and advanced statistical techniques to analyze
large-scale computer databases of electronic proxies for behavioral data. Electronic records
such as email and instant message records, hyperlinks on the World Wide Web, mobile phone
usage, and discussion on Usenet allow social scientists to directly observe and analyze social
behavior at multiple points in time and multiple levels of analysis without the constraints of
traditional empirical methods such as interviews, participant observation, or survey
instruments.[23] Continued improvements in machine learning algorithms likewise have
permitted social scientists and entrepreneurs to use novel techniques to identify latent and
meaningful patterns of social interaction and evolution in large electronic datasets.[24][25]

The automatic parsing of textual corpora has enabled the

extraction of actors and their relational networks on a vast
scale, turning textual data into network data. The resulting
networks, which can contain thousands of nodes, are then
analysed by using tools from Network theory to identify
the key actors, the key communities or parties, and general
properties such as robustness or structural stability of the
overall network, or centrality of certain nodes.[27] This
automates the approach introduced by quantitative
narrative analysis,[28] whereby subject-verb-object triplets
are identified with pairs of actors linked by an action, or
pairs formed by actor-object.[26]

Narrative network of US Elections

Computational content analysis 2012[26]

Content analysis has been a traditional part of social

sciences and media studies for a long time. The automation of content analysis has allowed a
"big data" revolution to take place in that field, with studies in social media and newspaper
content that include millions of news items. Gender bias, readability, content similarity, reader
preferences, and even mood have been analyzed based on text mining methods over millions of
documents.[29][30][31][32][33] The analysis of readability, gender bias and topic bias was
demonstrated in Flaounas et al.[34] showing how different topics have different gender biases
and levels of readability; the possibility to detect mood shifts in a vast population by analysing
Twitter content was demonstrated as well.[35]
The analysis of vast quantities of historical newspaper content has been pioneered by Dzogang
et al.,[36] which showed how periodic structures can be automatically discovered in historical
newspapers. A similar analysis was performed on social media, again revealing strongly
periodic structures.[37]

Challenges
Computational sociology, as with any field of study, faces a set of challenges.[38] These
challenges need to be handled meaningfully so as to make the maximum impact on society.

Levels and their interactions

Each society that is formed tends to be in one level or the other and there exists tendencies of
interactions between and across these levels. Levels need not only be micro-level or macro-
level in nature. There can be intermediate levels in which a society exists say - groups,
networks, communities etc.[38]

The question however arises as to how to identify these levels and how they come into
existence? And once they are in existence how do they interact within themselves and with
other levels?

If we view entities (agents) as nodes and the connections between them as the edges, we see the
formation of networks. The connections in these networks do not come about based on just
objective relationships between the entities, rather they are decided upon by factors chosen by
the participating entities.[39] The challenge with this process is that, it is difficult to identify
when a set of entities will form a network. These networks may be of trust networks, co-
operation networks, dependence networks etc. There have been cases where heterogeneous set
of entities have shown to form strong and meaningful networks among themselves.[40][41]

As discussed previously, societies fall into levels and in one such level, the individual level, a
micro-macro link[42] refers to the interactions which create higher-levels. There are a set of
questions that needs to be answered regarding these Micro-Macro links. How they are formed?
When do they converge? What is the feedback pushed to the lower levels and how are they
pushed?

Another major challenge in this category concerns the validity of information and their
sources. In recent years there has been a boom in information gathering and processing.
However, little attention was paid to the spread of false information between the societies.
Tracing back the sources and finding ownership of such information is difficult.

Culture modeling
The evolution of the networks and levels in the society brings about cultural diversity.[43] A
thought which arises however is that, when people tend to interact and become more accepting
of other cultures and beliefs, how is it that diversity still persists? Why is there no convergence?
A major challenge is how to model these diversities. Are there external factors like mass media,
locality of societies etc. which influence the evolution or persistence of cultural diversities?

Experimentation and evaluation

Any study or modelling when combined with experimentation needs to be able to address the
questions being asked. Computational social science deals with large scale data and the
challenge becomes much more evident as the scale grows. How would one design informative
simulations on a large scale? And even if a large scale simulation is brought up, how is the
evaluation supposed to be performed?

Model choice and model complexities

Another challenge is identifying the models that would best fit the data and the complexities of
these models. These models would help us predict how societies might evolve over time and
provide possible explanations on how things work.[44]

Generative models

Generative models helps us to perform extensive qualitative analysis in a controlled fashion. A

model proposed by Epstein, is the agent-based simulation, which talks about identifying an
initial set of heterogeneous entities (agents) and observe their evolution and growth based on
simple local rules.[45]
But what are these local rules? How does one identify them for a set of heterogeneous agents?
Evaluation and impact of these rules state a whole new set of difficulties.

Heterogeneous or ensemble models

Integrating simple models which perform better on individual tasks to form a Hybrid model is
an approach that can be looked into.[46] These models can offer better performance and
understanding of the data. However the trade-off of identifying and having a deep
understanding of the interactions between these simple models arises when one needs to come
up with one combined, well performing model. Also, coming up with tools and applications to
help analyse and visualize the data based on these hybrid models is another added challenge.

Impact
Computational sociology can bring impacts to science, technology and society.[38]

Impact on science

In order for the study of computational sociology to be effective, there has to be valuable
innovations. These innovation can be of the form of new data analytics tools, better models and
algorithms. The advent of such innovation will be a boon for the scientific community in large.

Impact on society

One of the major challenges of computational sociology is the modelling of social processes.
Various law and policy makers would be able to see efficient and effective paths to issue new
guidelines and the mass in general would be able to evaluate and gain fair understanding of the
options presented in front of them enabling an open and well balanced decision process..

See also
◾ Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
◾ Artificial society
◾ Simulated reality
◾ Social simulation
◾ Agent-based social simulation
◾ Social complexity
◾ Computational economics
◾ Computational epidemiology
◾ Cliodynamics
◾ Predictive analytics
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39. Egu´ıluz, V. M.; Zimmermann, M. G.; Cela-Conde, C. J.; San Miguel, M. "American Journal
of Sociology" (2005): 110, 977.
40. Sichman, J. S.; Conte, R. "Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory" (2002):
8(2).
41. Ehrhardt, G.; Marsili, M.; Vega-Redondo, F. "Physical Review E" (2006): 74(3).
42. Billari, Francesco C. Agent-based computational modelling: applications in demography,
social, economic and environmental sciences (https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&
id=Tc8iL0b-OycC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=%22Agent-based+computational+modelling:+appli
cations+in+demography,+social,+economic+and+environmental+sciences%22&ots=6MNV
K7JP-e&sig=-o_iS9zCK3r-t1eHn3554UVadUs). Taylor & Francis, 2006.
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Resolution" (2007): 51.
44. Weisberg, Michael. When less is more: Tradeoffs and idealization in model building (http://
www.academia.edu/download/30604870/lessmorefinal.pdf). Diss. Stanford University,
2003.
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modeling (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric_Jones14/publication/283615593_Book
_Review_-_Generative_Social_Science_Studies_in_Agent-Based_Computational_Modelin
g/links/5641398808aebaaea1f70216.pdf). Princeton University Press, 2006.
46. Yuan, Y., Alabdulkareem, A. & Pentland, A.S. An interpretable approach for social network
formation among heterogeneous agents (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07089-x). Nat
Commun 9, 4704 (2018).

External links
◾ On-line book "Simulation for the Social Scientist" by Nigel Gilbert and Klaus G. Troitzsch,
1999, second edition 2005 (http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/s4ss/)
◾ Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.ht
ml)
◾ Agent based models for social networks, interactive java applets (https://web.archive.org/w
eb/20110516072744/http://cmol.nbi.dk/models/)
◾ Sociology and Complexity Science Website (https://web.archive.org/web/20090827052722/
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~bcastel3/)

Journals and academic publications

◾ Complexity Research Journal List (https://web.archive.org/web/20100611121626/http://ww
w.ccsr.uiuc.edu/web/Journals/Journals.html), from UIUC, IL
◾ Related Research Groups (https://web.archive.org/web/20100611091342/http://www.ccsr.ui
uc.edu/web/Groups/Groups.html), from UIUC, IL

Associations, conferences and workshops

◾ North American Association for Computational Social and Organization Sciences (http://ww
w.casos.cs.cmu.edu/naacsos/)
◾ ESSA: European Social Simulation Association (http://www.essa.eu.org/)

Academic programs, departments and degrees

◾ University of Bristol "Mediapatterns" project (http://mediapatterns.enm.bris.ac.uk/)
◾ Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.cos.cs.cmu.edu/), PhD program (http://www.casos.
cs.cmu.edu) in Computation, Organizations and Society (COS)
◾ University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu)

◾ Certificate, MA and PhD in Computational Social Sciences (https://macss.uchicago.ed

u/)
◾ George Mason University (http://www.gmu.edu)

◾ PhD program in CSS (Computational Social Sciences) (http://css.gmu.edu)

◾ MA program in Master's of Interdisciplinary Studies, CSS emphasis (http://mais.gmu.ed
u/programs/la-mais-css)
◾ Portland State (http://www.pdx.edu/sysc/program-systems-science-phd-program), PhD
program in Systems Science
◾ Portland State (http://www.pdx.edu/sysc/program-systems-science-masters-program), MS
program in Systems Science
◾ University College Dublin (http://www.ucd.ie),

◾ PhD Program in Complex Systems and Computational Social Science (http://www.ucd.i

e/geary/postgraduatetraining/cscs)
◾ MSc in Social Data Analytics (https://sisweb.ucd.ie/usis/!W_HU_MENU.P_PUBLISH?p_
tag=PROG&MAJR=W390)
◾ BSc in Computational Social Science (https://www.myucd.ie/courses/social-sciences/co
mputational-social-science)
◾ UCLA (https://archive.is/20121215023745/http://hcs.ucla.edu/courses.htm), Minor in
Human Complex Systems
◾ UCLA (https://web.archive.org/web/20100211164501/http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~cyber/),
Major in Computational & Systems Biology (including behavioral sciences)
◾ Univ. of Michigan (http://cscs.umich.edu/education/undergrad/undergrad.html), Minor in
Complex Systems
◾ Systems Sciences Programs List (http://www.pdx.edu/sysc/resources-other-systems-scien
ce-programs), Portland State. List of other worldwide related programs.

Centers and institutes

North America

◾ Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (http://cnets.indiana.edu/), Indiana

University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
◾ Center for Complex Systems Research (https://web.archive.org/web/20110430200327/htt
p://www.ccsr.uiuc.edu/), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA.
◾ Center for Social Complexity (http://socialcomplexity.gmu.edu/), George Mason University,
Fairfax, VA, USA.
◾ Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity (http://www.asu.edu/clas/csdc/), Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
◾ Center of the Study of Complex Systems (http://www.cscs.umich.edu/), University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
◾ Human Complex Systems (http://hcs.ucla.edu/), University of California Los Angeles, Los
Angeles, CA, USA.
◾ Institute for Quantitative Social Science (http://www.iq.harvard.edu/), Harvard University,
Boston, MA, USA.
◾ Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) (http://www.nico.northwestern.edu/),
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL USA.
◾ Santa Fe Institute (http://www.santafe.edu/), Santa Fe, NM, USA.
◾ Duke Network Analysis Center, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

South America

◾ Modelagem de Sistemas Complexos (http://www5.each.usp.br/mestrado-academico-em-m

odelagem-de-sistemas-complexos/), University of São Paulo - EACH, São Paulo, SP,
Brazil
◾ Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia de Sistemas Complexos (http://inct.cnpq.br/web/
inct-sc), Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

Asia

◾ Bandung Fe Institute, Centre for Complexity in Surya University (http://bandungfe.net),

Bandung, Indonesia.
Europe

◾ Centre for Policy Modelling (http://cfpm.org), Manchester, UK.

◾ Centre for Research in Social Simulation (http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/), University of
Surrey, UK.
◾ UCD Dynamics Lab- Centre for Computational Social Science (https://web.archive.org/we
b/20130425014018/http://dl.ucd.ie/), Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College
Dublin, Ireland.
◾ Groningen Center for Social Complexity Studies (GCSCS) (http://www.rug.nl/research/gcsc
s/), Groningen, NL.
◾ Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation (SOMS) (http://www.soms.ethz.
ch/), Zürich, Switzerland.
◾ Research Group on Experimental and Computational Sociology (GECS) (http://www.eco.u
nibs.it/gecs/), Brescia, Italy

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