5, 6, 7), we may hypothesize that the interaction between the men and the women participating in the date imposes mutual constraints that result in a joint dating activity that can be characterized by leisure activities probably different from each of the parties’ unique distribution of preferences or their simple sum. However, as gender differences have been documented for leisure activities (e.g. Each person/particle involved in the date may have his own personal preferences for leisure activities and therefore for the best way for enjoying the date. For instance, let’s take the trivial case of dating. the dyad) with a unique and distinctive emerging signature. When a couple interacts, they do not simply influence each other, as popular definitions of interaction may propose, but through their joint activity form a new social state (i.e. The way this idea is relevant for modeling interactions is explained through the next example. 3 describe non-additivity in a general conceptual sense as the nonlinear function associating the system’s granularity level of analysis and its components’ degrees of freedom. For instance, when “merging” two interacting people into a collaborating dyad, the entropy of the merged dyad is non-additive, as described below. Social systems are clearly non-additive as the system’s degrees of freedom are not proportional to the increase in the size of the system. Non-extensive systems, or “non-additive” systems are modeled using a non-additive form of entropy 4, which is applied when the system that we analyse is characterized by strong correlations between its microstates and by emerging properties. 3 who study interactions through the perspective of statistical entropy and the concepts of additivity and non-additivity. We start by clarifying the idea of an interaction drawing on the approach proposed by Neuman et al. The aim of the current paper is to introduce a general conceptualization of interaction which is accompanied by operationalization through the use of relative entropy. the development of interactive technologies such as Chatbots). Not all social interactions are significant to the same extent and being able to identify significant interactions may be of interest both from a purely theoretical perspective and from a practical perspective (e.g. Adopting such an approach, may be relevant for the task of identifying significant relations/interactions. While there are some good reasons for this variety, it seems that it may be useful to use a general and physically motivated concept of interaction together with measures that are clearly derived from it.

In this context, one should also recall that in the social sciences the concept of interaction has been mostly used in a very general sense, covering a huge variety of instances from hugging to arguing.

In trying to address this challenge, one must be careful in bridging the gap between physics and the social sciences, as these two fields are not theoretically aligned and there is always the danger of using misleading analogies. This difference calls into question the general meaning of the term “interaction” and points to the need to better understand social interactions while still using physics as “point de repère”. Interactions are the hallmark of complex systems 1 but in the social context, interactions are totally different from those evident among the particles of non-living matter 2.

Relative entropy