Computational Social Science

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Overview

Computational social science studies how people and groups behave, interact, and organize, and how those processes shape outcomes such as opinion, inequality, and political change. Researchers combine statistical and causal analysis with social network analysis, natural language processing, and digital trace data from platforms, surveys, archives, and administrative records. Agent-based models and large language model agents are increasingly used to simulate social interaction, while text models help measure concepts such as ideology, sentiment, and trust. A central challenge is establishing that these measurements and simulations represent real social processes: models can match average patterns while missing human diversity, context, or causal mechanisms.

Latest papers

CardsList

166 papers15 papers in the last four weeks, down 35% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Conditional information Retrieval for Longitudinal Survey Harmonisation

    Oct 19, 2026Wing Yan Li, Zeqiang Wang, Michelle Lin +2Information RetrievalComputational Social Science

    University of Surrey · University College London

  2. Whose Polarization Is It? Auditing Fairness in Network Polarization Measures

    Oct 15, 2026Stanisław Stępień, Michalina Janik, Akrati Saxena +1Group FairnessAlgorithmic Fairness

    Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Wrocław, Poland · Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

  3. From Caricature to Collective Artifact: How Persona Construction Drives Polarization in Generative Social Simulations

    Oct 12, 2026Dimitris Michailidis, Petter Törnberg, Fernando P. SantosLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationComputational Social Science

    Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems, University of Amsterdam · Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam

  4. sGLP: Simulating People with Stochastic Agents

    Oct 10, 2026Ehud ShapiroLogic ProgrammingHuman Behavior Simulation

    London School of Economics and Weizmann Institute of Science, UK and Israel

  5. Les Misérables Dialogue: A film-based network representation of social communication

    Oct 9, 2026Theodora Moldovan, Georgios Panayiotou, Davide VegaSocial Network AnalysisComputational Social Science

    InfoLab, Dept. of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

  6. Large Language Models, Machine-Assisted Cultural Analytics, and the Agentic Turn

    Oct 8, 2026Andres KarjusLLM AgentsComputational Social Science

    Tallinn University; Estonian Business School; University of Tartu

  7. Measuring climate backlash in Twitter and Reddit archives: Lexical definitions, recorded responses and participant turnover

    Oct 6, 2026Wentao XuSocial Media AnalysisComputational Social Science

  8. JEV versus LLMs: Accuracy, Cost and Calibration on Seven Political Science Replications

    Oct 5, 2026Steven Denney, Matthew DiGiuseppeLLM EvaluationComputational Social Science

    Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University. · Institute of Political Science, Leiden University.

  9. Artificial Intelligence and the New Science of Culture

    Oct 5, 2026Douglas R. Guilbeault, Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan, James A. EvansCultural EvolutionComputational Social Science

    Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, U.S. · Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, U.K. · Sociology & Data Science, University of Chicago, U.S.

  10. Data-Driven Personas for Survey Simulation: Insights into Simulation Alignment Across Data-Access Regimes

    Oct 5, 2026Dongryeol Lee, Weronika Łajewska, Leonardo Perelli +1Computational Social ScienceUser Modeling

    Seoul National University · Amazon

  11. Inductive Claims Extraction at Scale

    Oct 4, 2026Sandrine Chausson, Björn RossSocial Media AnalysisArgument Mining

    University of Edinburgh

  12. How Do People Challenge Racial Stereotypes Online? Counter-Story Detection Across Reddit Communities

    Oct 3, 2026Uma Sushmitha Gunturi, Jimin Mun, Maarten Sap +1Social Media AnalysisComputational Social Science

    IBM · Carnegie Mellon University · University of Colorado Boulder

  13. Science Utopia? Closed-Loop LLM Simulation of Academic Research Ecosystems

    Oct 1, 2026Yiqiao Jin, Yiyang Wang, Lucheng Fu +8Scholarly Peer ReviewComputational Social Science

    Georgia Institute of Technology · University of California, Los Angeles · University of Chicago +1

  14. Paying for Too Many Tokens? Valid and Cost-Efficient Multimodal LLM Annotation with Simple Heuristics

    Sep 30, 2026Zhixi Zhu, Kristina GligoricVLM EvaluationVideo-Language Model Evaluation

    Johns Hopkins University

  15. MetaPersona: Task-Grounded Synthetic Populations from Empirical Social Science

    Sep 29, 2026Jinyi Ye, Yuangang Li, Chenxiao Yu +7Personality Modeling in Language ModelsSynthetic Data Generation

    University of Southern California · University of California, Irvine · 2077AI +1

  16. Fake News Theories: Harnessing Disciplinary Insights for Computational Modeling, Detection, and Explanation

    Sep 24, 2026Zhaoyang Cao, Miriam Metzger, Reza ZafaraniFake News DetectionComputational Social Science

    Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA · Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

  17. Artificial Societies Benchmark: A Validation Framework for Synthetic Research

    Sep 24, 2026Edoardo Chidichimo, Min Jun Jung, Felix P. S. Wallis +1Benchmark DesignComputational Social Science

    Artificial Societies University of Oxford, UK

  18. The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC): An Open Tool and Reproducible Pipeline for Analyzing Social Group Discourse at Scale

    Sep 22, 2026Babak Hemmatian, Sarah Hadjarab, Jessica Chen +1Social Media AnalysisComputational Social Science

    AI Innovation Institute, Stony Brook University · Department of Political Science, University of Chicago · Department of Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign +1

  19. From Utterances to Networks: Modelling Slang Adoption and Diffusion Across Subreddits

    Sep 22, 2026Xiaoning Wang, Ted Underwood, Zhewei SunSocial Network AnalysisSocial Media Analysis

    School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

  20. SocioVerse2: A Longitudinal Dynamic Social Simulation Framework under a Human-AI Co-evolutionary Paradigm

    Sep 21, 2026Xinnong Zhang, Jiayu Lin, Jia Wang +19Computational Social ScienceAgent-Based Modeling

    Shanghai Innovation Institute · Fudan University · Tongji University +7

  21. Evaluating Decision Models for Text Annotation in Computational Social Science

    Sep 21, 2026Hazem Ibrahim, Yasir ZakiLLM EvaluationLLM-Assisted Annotation

    Computer Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE

  22. Testing, not presuming, adequacy: calibrating generative social simulators against emergent network structure

    Sep 21, 2026Tengfei Shao, Chao Li, Xu Wang +1Simulation-Based InferenceComputational Social Science

    Global Education Center, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan · Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan · School of Informatics, Gunma University, Gunma, Japan

  23. From Web(logs) to Web(AI): Questions, Platforms, and Methods across Twenty Editions of ICWSM

    Sep 20, 2026Koustuv Saha, Eshwar ChandrasekharanSocial Media AnalysisComputational Social Science

    Siebel School of Computing and Data Science University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

  24. Social Influence and the Allocation of Scientific Attention in AI Populations

    Sep 18, 2026Maxim ChupilkinScientific CommunicationComputational Social Science

    Department of Politics and International Relations University of Oxford

  25. Digital Twins for Opinion Dynamics: A Generative LLM Framework for Social Networks

    Sep 17, 2026Omran Berjawi, Giuseppe Fenza, Rida Khatoun +1Opinion DynamicsHuman Behavior Simulation

    Information Processing and Communication Laboratory (LTCI) Institut Polytechnique de Paris, T´el´ecom Paris Palaiseau, France · Management & Information Systems (DISA-MIS) University of Salerno Fisciano, Italy · College of Communication and Information, University of Kentucky +1

  26. ABM-SIRTEM: A Hybrid Agent-Based and Epidemiological Model for Pandemic Response

    Sep 16, 2026Sheryl Paul, Samuel Williams, Preetom K. Biswas +2Dynamical SystemsHuman Behavior Simulation

    University of Southern California Los Angeles, USA

  27. BeWater: Effective Protesters Navigate Watersheds in Street Networks

    Sep 15, 2026Guillaume Moinard, Matthieu LatapyMulti-Agent CoordinationComputational Social Science

    Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, F-75005 Paris, France

  28. Quantifying Organizational Environmental Action from Web Data and Large Language Models

    Sep 15, 2026Quinn Reynolds, Daniel Shore, Vianey Leos Barajas +2Semantic SearchDocument Information Extraction

    Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto · School of the Environment, University of Toronto

  29. Making Political Text Scaling Comparable: Infrastructure and Hyperparameter Sensitivity for 17 Algorithms

    Sep 13, 2026Patrick ParschanComputational Social ScienceHyperparameter Optimization

    Department of Media and Communication LMU Munich

  30. Graph Neural Networks for Influence Maximization in Social Networks: An Unsupervised Minimum Dominating Set Approach

    Sep 12, 2026Erfan Ahmadi, Mina Shirazi, Behnam BahrakSocial Network AnalysisInfluence Maximization

    Computer Engineering Department, Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies (TeIAS), Tehran, Iran. · University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.