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

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

  1. Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook

    Feb 23, 2026H. C. W. Price, H. AlMuhanna, P. M. Bassani +2Social Network AnalysisSocial Media Analysis

    Centre for Complexity Science, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, U.K. · Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, U.K. · Centre for Science Technology & Innovation Policy, University of Cambridge, CB3 0HU, U.K. +1

  2. OpenClaw AI Agents as Informal Learners at Moltbook: Characterizing an Emergent Learning Community at Scale

    Feb 21, 2026Eason Chen, Ce Guan, Ahmed Elshafiey +5Agentic AIComputational Social Science

    Sui Foundation

  3. Measuring Social Integration Through Participation: Categorizing Organizations and Leisure Activities in the Displaced Karelians Interview Archive using LLMs

    Feb 17, 2026Joonatan Laato, Veera Schroderus, Jenna Kanerva +3Computational Social ScienceLLM-Assisted Annotation

    TurkuNLP, University of Turku, Finland · Department of Biology, University of Turku, Finland · ELLIS Institute Finland

  4. EnsembleLink: Accurate Record Linkage Without Training Data

    Jan 29, 2026Noah DasanaikeEntity ResolutionComputational Social Science

    PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University

  5. Generating consensus and dissent on massive discussion platforms with a semantic-vector model

    Jan 20, 2026A. Ferrer, D. Muñoz-Jordán, A. Rivero +3Opinion DynamicsComputational Social Science

    Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain · Kampal Data Solutions, WTCZ, Avda. Maria Zambrano 31, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain · Departamento de Física Teórica, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain +2

  6. Making Interpretable Discoveries from Unstructured Data: A High-Dimensional Multiple Hypothesis Testing Approach

    Nov 3, 2025Jacob CarlsonSelective InferenceInterpretable ML

    Harvard University∗

  7. Iterative Topic Taxonomy Induction with LLMs: A Case Study of Electoral Advertising

    Oct 16, 2025Alexander Brady, Tunazzina IslamSocial Media AnalysisPolitical Discourse Analysis

    Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland · Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

  8. Generalized Multi-agent Social Simulation Framework

    Sep 26, 2025Gang Li, Jie Lin, Yining Tang +6Multi-Agent LLM SystemsLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    Zhejiang University, China

  9. Prompts to Proxies: Emulating Human Preferences via a Compact LLM Ensemble

    Sep 14, 2025Bingchen Wang, Zi-Yu Khoo, Jingtan WangPreference ModelingComputational Social Science

    Independent Researcher, China · AI Singapore, Singapore · School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  10. Computational Multi-Agents Society Experiments: Social Modeling Framework Based on Generative Agents

    Aug 24, 2025Hanzhong Zhang, Muhua Huang, Jindong WangComputational Social ScienceAgent-Based Modeling

    William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA · Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  11. RooseBERT: A New Deal For Political Language Modelling

    Aug 5, 2025Deborah Dore, Elena Cabrio, Serena VillataLanguage Model PretrainingArgument Mining

    Universit´e Cˆote d’Azur CNRS, INRIA, I3S Sophia Antipolis, France

  12. Introducing HALC: A general pipeline for the systematic and reliable construction of prompts for automated coding with LLMs in the computational social sciences

    Jul 29, 2025Andreas Reich, Claudia Thoms, Tobias SchrimpfLLM PromptingLLM-Assisted Annotation

  13. From the Fluency Fallacy to the Micro-to-Macro Validity Gap: Opportunities and Pitfalls of LLMs in Social Simulation

    Jul 25, 2025Patrick Taillandier, Jean Daniel Zucker, Arnaud Grignard +4Human Behavior SimulationComputational Social Science

    UR MIAT, University of Toulouse, INRAE, Castanet-Tolosan, France · UMI UMMISCO, IRD, Sorbonne University, Bondy, France · UMR IRIT, University Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France +2

  14. LLM-Based Social Simulations Require a Boundary

    Jun 24, 2025Zengqing Wu, Run Peng, Takayuki Ito +2LLM EvaluationHuman Behavior Simulation

    University of Osaka · University of Michigan · Kyoto University +1

  15. Modeling Earth-Scale Human-Like Societies with One Billion Agents

    Jun 7, 2025Haoxiang Guan, Jiyan He, Liyang Fan +10Human Behavior SimulationComputational Social Science

    University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China. · Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China. +4

  16. Detection and Characterization of Coordinated Online Behavior: A Survey

    Aug 2, 2024Lorenzo Mannocci, Michele Mazza, Anna Monreale +2Social Media AnalysisComputational Social Science

    University of Pisa, Italy · Institute for Informatics and Telematics, National Research Council (IIT-CNR), Italy