The second to last post is what I call Peak Fleck because it sounds a lot like a quantified version of what he described in his book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1930s), the book which went on to influence Kuhn's Scientific Revolution (1962), which itself introduced the word "paradigm" as we now use it. The rest of these articles are along the same lines.
How the loss of experienced individual elephants stops knowledge transfer between generations
May 2025, phys.org
Elephants rely heavily on elder members to navigate their environments, find resources, and avoid predators. The research highlighted that the presence of older, knowledgeable individuals—especially matriarchs—improves calf survival rates and enhances group decision-making. Without these elders, populations often face long-term setbacks."Elders are the keepers of knowledge in elephant societies. Their loss disrupts the transmission of essential survival skills, much like losing a library in human terms. Conserving these social ties is as important as protecting their physical habitats."
via University of Portsmouth's Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology: Lucy Bates et al, Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0132
Collective memory loss in herring results in 800 km shift in spawning grounds
May 2025, phys.org
Previous research has indicated that age-selective fishing targeting older fish can disrupt cultural transmission, fragmenting established migration routes.Analysis of fisheries records, acoustic-trawl surveys, and tagging data indicated a substantial northward migration, with the center of spawning activity shifting approximately 800 km from Møre to Lofoten.Now that a new migratory pattern has emerged, reinforced by collective migration memory, restoring historical patterns may be impossible.
via Institute of Marine Research in Norway: Aril Slotte et al, Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08983-3
The hidden mechanics of abrupt transitions: Superconducting networks show how tiny changes trigger system collapse
Jul 2025, phys.org
They're looking at interdependent superconducting networks and found a hidden spontaneous sequence of micro-scale events that gradually destabilize a system until it snaps.When this system approaches a "critical" points, it doesn't transition smoothly from a superconducting state to a resistive one. Instead, the system lingers, for hundreds of seconds, in a long-lived intermediate phase. Then, without further prompting, it abruptly transitions into the new state.At the heart of this behavior is a concept known as the branching factor—a term that gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It represents the average number of new changes triggered by each event. When the branching factor is less than one, the cascade quickly dies out. If it exceeds one, the process accelerates uncontrollably.
via Bar-Ilan University, Northeastern, and CEU Vienna: Bnaya Gross et al, The random cascading origin of abrupt transitions in interdependent systems, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61127-z
Why your friends may be more susceptible to social influence than you are
Jul 2025, phys.org
Good nuance being added here, and it's so counter-intuitive, or just plain confusing, that it should probably knock off right away most people who try to understand it.
The Susceptibility Paradox - users' friends are more influenceable than the users themselves
"It's not just about who you are - it's about where you are in a network, and who you're connected to"Researchers looked at two kinds of behavior on X/Twitter: influence-driven sharing, when people post something after seeing it from others in their network; and spontaneous sharing, when they post without that exposure. In influence-driven cases, people who were less likely to be influenced were often surrounded by others who were more likely to share what they saw. This mirrors the Friendship Paradox, a finding from network science that says your friends are likely to have more friends than you do.Homophily was especially strong in influence-driven sharing. People who post because they saw others do it were often part of tight-knit circles with similar behavior.In many cases, knowing how a user's friends behave was enough to estimate how the user would behave. Spontaneous sharing was different. When people shared content without apparent peer exposure, their decisions were harder to predict from the network alone.
via University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute: Luca Luceri et al, The Susceptibility Paradox in Online Social Influence, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2406.11553
Offline interactions predict voting patterns better than online networks, finds study
Oct 2025, phys.org
Co-location explained 97% of the variance in county-level voting patterns, compared to 85%–87% for online connections and 75%–80% for residential proximity.
- They used Meta's Data for Good program, which collates anonymized data collected from people who enabled location services on the Facebook smartphone app.
- Colocation is defined as two people being within the same map tile less than 600×600 meters for at least five minutes.
- The political affiliation of each person was inferred from their county of residence.
- Data was compared with Facebook friendships and residential proximity for all U.S. counties, along with individual survey responses from 2,420 Americans regarding their offline and online social networks during the 2020 presidential election.
- For the residential proximity measurement, the voter registrations of the closest 1,000 neighbors were used.
via University of Trento Italy: Marco Tonin et al, Physical partisan proximity outweighs online ties in predicting US voting outcomes, PNAS Nexus (2025). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf308
More friends, more division: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
Oct 2025, phys.org
AKA Peak Fleck
- To measure political polarization, they used 27,000 surveys from the Pew Research Center, and 30 different surveys totaling over 57,000 respondents from Europe and the US, including the General Social Survey (US) and the European Social Survey.
- Increasing polarization is not merely perceived - it is measurable and objectively occurring; and this increase happened suddenly between 2008 and 2010.
- -For decades, sociological studies showed that people maintained an average of about two close friends - people who could influence their opinions on important issues."
- "Around 2008, there was a sharp increase from an average of two close friends to four or five."
- "When network density increases with more connections, polarization within the collective inevitably rises sharply."
- "This finding impressed us greatly because it could provide a fundamental explanation."
- They refer to it as a phase change (because it's so abrupt).
- Their explanation: "If I have two friends, I do everything I can to keep them—I am very tolerant towards them. But if I have five and things become difficult with one of them, it's easier to end that friendship because I still have 'backups.' I no longer need to be as tolerant."
"More and more people are clearly aligning themselves with one political camp rather than holding a mixture."
This sounds like Fleck's description, of how the two sides get bigger and stronger and more concentrated until one wins. (He uses the developemnt of the scientific understanding of Syphilis among scientists and among the public.)
via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Thurner, Stefan, Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2517530122.
Quantifying social avoidance: Game-based choices reflect real-world relationship patterns and network size
Apr 2025, phys.org
Instead of relying on self-reported behavior, they observed participants taking part in a "choose your own adventure" style game."We wanted to test the hypothesis that social avoidance can be understood as a form of navigation within an abstract social space defined by two social dimensions: 'affiliation' (e.g., warmth, friendliness) and 'power' (e.g., dominance, control). We put nearly 800 online participants into the position of having just moved to a new town, with no job, no friends and no place to live, where they had to interact with people and navigate the social situations to accomplish these goals ... Declining to share personal information with a character would reduce the affiliation in the relationship, while complying with an overbearing and direct request from a character would reduce the participant's power." They used a geometry-based approach where participants were placed on a grid defined by affiliation and power, and they measured where and how they moved on the grid.Results - people higher in self-reported social avoidance consistently made low affiliation and low power choices in our game, as we expected, and the "social distance" participants created between characters in the game they played mirrored their real social lives as described in self-report questionnaires. Specifically, the real-world social networks of participants who created more social distance between characters were found to be smaller and less diverse.
via Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: Matthew Schafer et al, Social avoidance can be quantified as navigation in abstract social space, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00215-8.
