Polarisation across individuals leads to the formation of distinct factions which prevents us from reaching consensus on important societal issues. Individual cases of polarisation, radicalisation for instance, sometimes lead to harmful extremist behaviours.

Various scientific disciplines study these types of processes. Psychology studies the formation of attitudes in individuals, whereas sociology and political science are concerned with the collective properties of polarisation. These collective properties are also studied in statistical physics and computational science. Over the last decade, the statistical physics of social dynamics became a field in itself, with many different approaches to the formal modelling and simulation of social phenomena.

Scientific lead:

UvA researchers

Affiliated external researchers

• Brian Castellani (University of Durham, IAS fellow)
• Andreas Flache (University of Groningen, IAS fellow)
• Lasse Gerrits (Erasmus University Rotterdam, IAS fellow)
• Michael Mäs (University of Groningen)