News + Events

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with others, or anti-conformity, the choice to deliberately diverge. A new way to model this dynamic interplay could ultimately help explain societal phenomena like political polarization, cultural trends, and the spread of misinformation. 

Knowing only the building blocks of our own biosphere, can we predict how life may exist on other planets? What factors will rein in the Frankensteinian life forms we hope to build in laboratories here on Earth? A paper in Interface Focus co-authored by several SFI researchers takes these questions out of the realm of science fiction and into scientific laws.

Multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous and also notoriously difficult to model. In disturbed systems, conventional bottom-up or top-down approaches can’t capture the interactions between the small-scale behaviors and the system-level properties. SFI External Professor John Harte and his collaborators have worked to resolve this challenge by building a hybrid method that links bottom-up behaviors and top-down causation in a single theory. 

A recent study by SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Katrin Schmelz and coauthors explores various scenarios when it may be beneficial to stand out and when it might be better to blend in. 

In a new PNAS Perspective, a team of authors argues that stochastic thermodynamics provides the mathematical tools needed to investigate the energy usage of all computational systems.

A new study in Theory and Society shows that the printing of witch-hunting manuals, particularly the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, played a crucial role in spreading persecution across Europe. The study also highlights how trials in one city influenced others. This social influence — observing what neighbors were doing — played a key role in whether a city would adopt witch trials.

In a new paper in Science Advances, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhaho Zhang reports on how higher-order interactions can reshape a system at large — even global — scales.

The beliefs we hold develop from a complex dance between our internal and external lives. A recent study published in Psychological Review uses well-known formalisms in statistical physics to model multiple aspects of belief-network dynamics. This multidimensional approach to modeling belief dynamics could offer new tools for tackling various real-world problems such as polarization or the spread of disinformation.

On August 19–23, SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell and SFI External Professor John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins University) led a working group on “The Nature of Intelligence.” It was the first in a series of six meetings to be held over the next three years. Scholars from diverse fields — neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and AI — were invited to investigate the broad notion of intelligence, whether in machines or biological systems. 

A new paper by Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kerice Doten-Snitker studies how government-sanctioned violence in medieval Germany diffused from one community to another. Doten-Snitker describes which factors encouraged the spread of Jewish expulsions in the Holy Roman Empire, and which had a dampening effect. 

In a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, SFI's Mirta Galesic and Henrik Olsson explore the benefits — and potential pitfalls — of several common analogies used to model belief dynamics. 

Getting individuals to act in the best interest of society can be a tricky balancing act, one that often walks a fine line between trying to convince people to act of their own volition, versus passing laws and regulations that make these actions compulsory. A new paper in PNAS Nexus presents a mathematical model and an agent-based model that shows the effectiveness of influencers who convince others to make decisions in the best interest of society.

For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth — a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as the equator — a new creature burst into existence: the multicellular organism. Why did multicellularity arise? Solving that mystery may help pinpoint life on other planets and explain the vast diversity and complexity seen on Earth today, from sea sponges to redwoods to human society.

Times of crisis often call for strong and rapid action, but in polarized societies, strong top-down policies can backfire. In a paper published on June 17, 2024, in Environmental Research Letters, SFI Applied Complexity Fellow Saverio Perri, SFI Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University), and colleagues present a conceptual model of how these dynamics could play out in efforts to decarbonize our energy supply.

A a June 10–14 workshop meets to develop a new poll for the Database of Religious History to help researchers interested in quantifying the role of music and ritual in religious practices around the world. 

Most organizations operate under command hierarchies: workers, who know the ground reality, report to managers, who know the big picture. In a recent paper, three researchers use an agent-based model to explore how the performance of hierarchical groups varies with changing environments.

Health-science research could benefit from pairing two unique methods of study, argue SFI External Professor Ross Hammond and Sharin Barkin in a May 15 perspective in PNAS. When used together, traditional trials and computational models “offer powerful synergy,” write the authors.

A recent study finds that exposure to conservation programs encourages future participation, even when the early programs fail.

In a paper published in Physical Review X on May 13, a quartet of physicists and computer scientists expand the modern theory of the thermodynamics of computation. By combining approaches from statistical physics and computer science, the researchers introduce mathematical equations that reveal the minimum and maximum predicted energy cost of computational processes that depend on randomness, which is a powerful tool in modern computers. 

Will a certain tritium atom decay by a certain time? According to our current science, this question concerning physical phenomena should be answered by sampling from a probability distribution, a process not unlike spinning a roulette wheel or rolling dice. However, a paper in Foundations of Physics suggests that the same could be true of a question concerning mathematical phenomena, even one as prosaic as “what is 2+2?”