An Interview with Professor Alex Pentland

A: Social Physics explained the new academic discipline of “Computational Social Science.” Now 10 years old, this new discipline and capability set has already helped launch the European privacy law discussions, shape the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and led to the founding of hundreds of new research labs at universities around the world. It has also guided the creation of commercial companies in health, commerce, and security that touch hundreds of millions of people daily.

The Social Physics perspective comes from the realization that human decision-making depends on sharing information among cooperative actors. While perhaps obvious on its face, the process involved in such decision-making is quite different from the individual reasoning that dominates discussions in traditional economics and policymaking.