The challenges that our societies face nowadays (economic crisis, pandemics, social inequality, climate change, etc.) require more than ever an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand the dynamics of the different socio-economical phenomena, like the formation of opinion and its diffusion, the adoption of norms and innovations, the integration of different constraints in mobility or consumption, etc., which can be seriously modified by those critical events.
Formal modelling of social phenomena, rooted in disciplinary knowledge and formulated in a way that allows to apply notions and tools of statistical physics, dynamical systems or network theory, has been successful in revealing the interplay between the interactions at the level of the individuals and their large-scale consequences. In parallel, more recently and often in an independent way, the facilitated access to a large amount of social data, allowed for studies at an unprecedented large scale of different problems in social systems, like the formation of consensus or the polarization of opinions, the formation and diffusion of rumors or fake news, etc.
Until now, these two approaches still run on parallel roads, as the formal models are too stylized to allow for comparison with case studies that are too specific. It is time to enhance efforts to bring these two approaches together. “Bridging the theoretical and empirical approaches to social dynamics” aims to contribute with this task by fostering exchanges among specialists of different disciplines, who study social phenomena either theoretically or empirically.
