Center for Social Complexity – Center for Social Complexity

Welcome to The Center for Social Complexity

The Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University is a specialized venue for pursuing interdisciplinary advanced research, discoveries, and inventions that support exploration and analysis of human social phenomena. It was created in 2002 under the Provost’s Initiative in Computational Social Science and Social Complexity.

The Center subscribes to the philosophy of exploiting synergistic interactions between purely theoretical and applied policy research. Pure research and problem-oriented research can often profit from each other. The benefits of the pure-applied synergy have been amply demonstrated in the history of the social sciences (e.g., learning, human factors, organizations, governance, conflict resolution, peacekeeping), as well as in the life sciences and the physical sciences.

What is Social Complexity

Social complexity is the study of the phenomena of human existence – emigration patterns, armed conflicts, political movements, marriage practices, natural disasters, etc, etc – and the many possible arrangements of relationships between those discrete phenomena.

Social complexity reflects human behavior as it is exercised in ongoing and increasingly broader and more complicated circumstances of individual and group existence. Social complexity has emerged as the conceptual and practical framework wherein these phenomena and their relationships can be studied.

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List of Terms

Origins of Social Complexity