Abstract
The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social consensus. However, the literature is vast and widely scattered across fields, making it hard for the single researcher to navigate it. This short review aims to provide a compact overview of the main dimensions over which the debate has unfolded and to discuss some representative examples. It focuses on those situations in which consensus emerges ‘spontaneously’ in the absence of centralized institutions and covers topics that include the macroscopic consequences of the different microscopic rules of behavioural contagion, the role of social networks and the mechanisms that prevent the formation of a consensus or alter it after it has emerged. Special attention is devoted to the recent wave of experiments on the emergence of consensus in social systems.
Highlights
Money, language, dress codes, decorum, notions of fairness all need to be accepted and shared at the group level in order to function
By adopting the language of social conventions, possibly the simplest example of social consensus taken from the Social Sciences (§2), I will start by mapping the landscape of proposed solutions to the problem of consensus (§3) before focusing on the case of spontaneous emergence in the absence of a centralized authority (§4)
Agent-based modelling aims to understand the global consequences of individual adaptive behaviour relying on the concepts of emergence and self-organization developed in statistical physics
Summary
Language, dress codes, decorum, notions of fairness all need to be accepted and shared at the group level in order to function. By adopting the language of social conventions, possibly the simplest example of social consensus taken from the Social Sciences (§2), I will start by mapping the landscape of proposed solutions to the problem of consensus (§3) before focusing on the case of spontaneous emergence in the absence of a centralized authority (§4). In this context, by considering two simple models, I will discuss how different kinds of behavioural contagion and social networks influence the dynamics of collective agreement (§5), as well as which mechanisms can either alter (§6), or hinder or prevent consensus (§7). I will provide an overview of recent experiments that provide empirical basis to the study of the emergence of consensus in social systems (§8)
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