Searching for laws of human behavior - Sune Lehmann
20th of May 2026, 10:00-12:00
Human behaviour is often seen as too complex, context-dependent, and historically contingent to admit anything like scientific laws. Nevertheless, as a physicist working to understand the data-trails that human beings leave behind as we go about our daily lives in the highly interconnected and monitored early 21st century, Sune Lehmann will argue that searching for “laws” of behaviour can still drive important insights. Using human mobility as a case study, he will show how people explore, but within quantifiable limits; they organise their spatial lives into a conserved hierarchy of scales; and some regularities only become visible once the structure of geography itself is properly accounted for. These findings suggest that a quantitative, law-like description of human behaviour is sometimes possible (albeit one that is statistical, scale-dependent, and shaped by the environments in which behaviour unfolds). Alongside the empirical results, Sune Lehmann will reflect on the research process itself: how these discoveries emerged less from testing pre-specified hypotheses than from open-ended exploration of rich datasets, following surprising patterns wherever they led, and what that might tell us about how to search for laws more broadly.