Editorial: Exploring human interactions through sociophysics: dynamics of opinion formation

How do opinions spread, consolidate, and polarize within a society? How can local perturbations trigger macroscopic shifts in collective consensus? These questions, long central to the social sciences, have gained a powerful new angle of inquiry through sociophysics—a discipline that applies the formalisms of statistical physics and complex systems to the analysis of collective human behavior. By recasting social phenomena as instances of well-studied physical processes—phase transitions, diffusion, fluid dynamics—sociophysics offers tractable quantitative models that complement qualitative sociological analysis and have the potential to guide real-world interventions.