---
title: "Quantum social science"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_social_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:58:33.648777+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Applications ==
Ideas from quantum physics have long inspired thinkers in areas such as politics, diplomacy, and international relations. The journalist Flora Lewis spoke of the "Quantum Mechanics of Politics" in 1975. In a 1997 lecture on "Diplomacy in the Information Age", former US Secretary of State George P. Shultz credits the physicist Sidney Drell for coining the term "quantum diplomacy" to describe how diplomats need to account for uncertainty and the fact that "the process of observation itself is a cause of change". In a 2011 paper, James Der Derian proposed quantum diplomacy as a way to understand the entanglements brought about by a globalized media and a multiplicity of actors operating at different levels. These ideas have been a theme of Der Derian's annual Q-Symposium since 2014. In a 2018 address to the Trilateral Commission, Danah Zohar argued that a mechanistic worldview has led to problems from inequality to climate change, and that we need to shift to a quantum perspective which incorporates effects such as uncertainty and entanglement.
While Wendt's 2015 book Quantum Mind and Social Science does not focus on political science, it does discuss the applicability of quantum theory to social systems in general, and its publication has led to extensive analysis and discussion on this topic. Other related areas where quantum ideas are seeing applications include quantum game theory, quantum decision theory, quantum finance and quantum economics. In a 2019 article for the Bretton Woods Committee, Andrew Sheng wrote that "A quantum paradigm of finance and the economy is slowly emerging, and its nonlinear, complex nature may help the design of a future global economy and financial architecture."

== Criticism ==
Quantum social science is contested by critics, who argue that it inappropriately imports ideas from quantum physics into the social domain. The most common criticism is that due to quantum decoherence, quantum effects are filtered out at the macroscopic level, so cannot affect social systems. The physicist Max Tegmark for example has argued that brains cannot sustain quantum coherence.
A related point of controversy is whether quantum science should be applied to social systems only metaphorically, or whether it should be taken as a physical description of those systems. This in turn relates to a broader debate in the sciences about scientific realism, which applies also to quantum physics.

== See also ==
Quantum mysticism

== References ==