Tools of physics in modelling of public opinion changes

Interdisciplinary approach to sociology studies, including applicability of physics methods and notions to solving sociological problems, is becoming ever more popular as shown by several papers to be discussed by the speaker. The “sociophysics” term was recently coined for such studies. Physicists are motivated to study complicated social systems by their non-trivial inner and external dynamics. Socio-physical models make possible to identify regularities that can be described using some notions known from statistical physics, including entropy, phase transitions, order parameters. Such description helps to better understand social mechanisms at a mass scale. Analyses of public opinions in social groups is one of the important fields of sociophysics. Some models of shaping the opinions and results obtained from the models will be presented.