title: Simple mathematical law benchmarks human confrontations.
abstract: Many high-profile societal problems involve an individual or group repeatedly attacking another - from child-parent disputes, sexual violence against women, civil unrest, violent conflicts and acts of terror, to current cyber-attacks on national infrastructure and ultrafast cyber-trades attacking stockholders. There is an urgent need to quantify the likely severity and timing of such future acts, shed light on likely perpetrators, and identify intervention strategies. Here we present a combined analysis of multiple datasets across all these domains which account for >100,000 events, and show that a simple mathematical law can benchmark them all. We derive this benchmark and interpret it, using a minimal mechanistic model grounded by state-of-the-art fieldwork. Our findings provide quantitative predictions concerning future attacks; a tool to help detect common perpetrators and abnormal behaviors; insight into the trajectory of a 'lone wolf'; identification of a critical threshold for spreading a message or idea among perpetrators; an intervention strategy to erode the most lethal clusters; and more broadly, a quantitative starting point for cross-disciplinary theorizing about human aggression at the individual and group level, in both real and online worlds.
authors: Department of Physics, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL33124 U.S.A.
authors: Neil F
authors: NF
authors: Johnson
authors: Pablo
authors: P
authors: Medina
authors: Guannan
authors: G
authors: Zhao
authors: Daniel S
authors: DS
authors: Messinger
authors: John
authors: J
authors: Horgan
authors: Paul
authors: P
authors: Gill
authors: Juan Camilo
authors: JC
authors: Bohorquez
authors: Whitney
authors: W
authors: Mattson
authors: Devon
authors: D
authors: Gangi
authors: Hong
authors: H
authors: Qi
authors: Pedro
authors: P
authors: Manrique
authors: Nicolas
authors: N
authors: Velasquez
authors: Ana
authors: A
authors: Morgenstern
authors: Elvira
authors: E
authors: Restrepo
authors: Nicholas
authors: N
authors: Johnson
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Spagat
authors: Roberto
authors: R
authors: Zarama
mesh_terms: D000374:Aggression; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D066264:Datasets as Topic; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical