Reviews in Social Physics: 2026

Frontiers in Physics is delighted to present “Reviews in Social Physics: 2026”. This Research Topic will feature authoritative Review and Mini Review articles covering major advances across social physics: highlighting what we currently understand, what remains contested, and which directions look most promising for future research and societal impact.We welcome contributions that connect theory, data, modeling/simulation, and empirical validation to explain, predict, or manage collective social phenomena – especially work that helps address complex societal challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration.We encourage Review and Mini Review submissions that cover established and emerging areas such as:• Social networks and higher-order interaction structures: diffusion, contagion, and resilience• Econophysics and socioeconomic inequality, market dynamics, and systemic risk• Information cascades, polarization, and opinion formation across online/offline settings• Human cooperation, mobility, and collective decision-making, including voting behaviors• Crowd and pedestrian dynamics, collective motion, evacuation and safety modeling• Traffic and transportation as coupled socio-technical systems; congestion, control, and tipping phenomena• Epidemic spreading and vaccination/immunization as social-physics problems • Hierarchy formation and patterns of social organization• Cultural and language dynamics, innovation, and social learning• Self-organization and tipping points in social and socio-ecological systems• Smart cities, urban analytics, and computational approaches to wellbeing and sustainability• AI and society: how AI systems reshape behavior, social interaction, and networked environments This Research Topic aims to serve as a practical reference for researchers and innovators, and a catalyst for new collaborations and future Research Topics. Topic editors: Matjaž Perc Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79409/reviews-in-social-physics-2026