The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbour Usually Looks Like You - Hardcover

A groundbreaking social theory reveals the essential and surprising simplicity of human behavior. Why are some bars crowded one week and empty the next? What keeps a book on the bestseller list? What makes ethnic violence break out? Why do neighborhoods gentrify all of a sudden? What causes the stock market to fluctuate? Look at patterns, not people, the way that physicists observe atoms, and you will find the answers. For years, the idiosyncrasies of human decision-making have confounded economists and social theorists, most of whom have relied on an old way of thinking that says the social world is complicated because people are complicated. Now, says theoretical physicist Mark Buchanan, we're witnessing something akin to a quantum revolution in the social sciences. The laws of physics are beginning to provide a new picture of the human or social atom and this is a picture that does not conflict with the existence of individual free will. Just as atomic-level chaos gives way to the clockwork precision of thermodynamics, so can free individuals come together into predictable patterns. Social physicists can dissect fads, anticipate whether companies will succeed or fail, and explain crime waves. In this eye-opening book, Buchanan suggests that understanding the laws of collective organization is the key challenge of our age. Brimming with mind games and provocative experiments, The Social Atom is an incisive, accessible, and comprehensive argument for a whole new way to look at human social behavior.

Mark Buchanan is a science writer whose previous books, Ubiquity (Orion, 2001) and Small World (Orion, 2003), were critically acclaimed. He is the former editor of Nature and features editor of New Scientist magazines.