Programme

Searching for laws of human behaviour

Human behaviour is often seen as too complex, context-dependent, and historically contingent to admit anything like scientific laws. Nevertheless, as a physicist working to understand the data-trails that human beings leave behind as we go about our daily lives in the highly interconnected and monitored early 21st century, Sune Lehmann will argue that searching for “laws” of behaviour can still drive important insights. Using human mobility as a case study, he will show how people explore, but within quantifiable limits; they organise their spatial lives into a conserved hierarchy of scales; and some regularities only become visible once the structure of geography itself is properly accounted for. These findings suggest that a quantitative, law-like description of human behaviour is sometimes possible (albeit one that is statistical, scale-dependent, and shaped by the environments in which behaviour unfolds). Alongside the empirical results, Sune Lehmann will reflect on the research process itself: how these discoveries emerged less from testing pre-specified hypotheses than from open-ended exploration of rich datasets, following surprising patterns wherever they led, and what that might tell us about how to search for laws more broadly.

Speakers

Sune Lehmann

Sune Lehmann is Professor of Complexity and Network Science at the Technical University of Denmark and a professor of data science at the Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) at the University of Copenhagen. His work focuses on quantitative understanding of social systems based on massive data sets. A physicist by training, his research draws on approaches from the physics of complex systems, machine learning, and statistical analysis. He works on large-scale behavioural data, and while his primary focus is on modelling complex networks, his research has made substantial contributions to topics such as human mobility, sleep, academic performance, complex contagion, epidemic spreading, and behaviour on social media. He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and a Chief Scientist in the Danish National Center for AI in Society (CAISA).

About the organiser: DIEP

The Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) is an interdisciplinary research centre across fundamental sciences with the purpose of furthering the understanding of emergent phenomena. Its goal is to create an interdisciplinary research programme among these different institutes that covers subjects such information theory, topological phases of matter, multiscale modelling, networks, complex systems, emergence of causality, non-equilibrium systems, collective intelligence, among many others.