Foreword to the SCED special issue on “Nonlinear Social Dynamics”

Social Dynamics aims at providing a unifying view on the evolution of social systems, including social conflicts and dilemmas, interactions between populations and the environment, financial markets and the broader macroeconomy, by looking at the interplay between individual behavior at the micro-level and collective behaviors at the macro-level. This view emphasizes the role of boundedly rational behavior based on local information and conditioned by psychological biases, the interactions among heterogeneous agents and the resulting aggregate behaviors which, in turn, provide feedback to individual decisions.