In recent years, political activists have taken to social media platforms to rapidly reach broad audiences. Despite the prevalence of micro-blogging in these sociopolitical movements, the degree to which virtual mobilization reflects or drives real-world movements is unclear. Here, we explore the dynamics of real-world events and Twitter social cohesion in Syria during the Arab Spring. Using the nonlinear methods cross-recurrence quantification analysis and windowed cross-recurrence quantification analysis, we investigate if frequency of events of different intensities are coupled with social cohesion found in Syrian tweets. Results indicate that online social cohesion is coupled with the counts of all, positive, and negative events each day but shows a decreased connection to negative events when outwardly directed events (i.e., source events) were considered. We conclude with a discussion of implications and applications of nonlinear methods in political science research.

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While interpersonal coordination, collective intelligence, and selforganization have been fundamental in the study of human social interaction over the past several decades, these phenomena have a rich history in non-human systems as well. This special issue aims to unite disciplines studying inter-entity coordination of action in shared conversation. Here, we bring together ecological psychologists, ecologists, biologists, neuroethologists, and chemists, all working toward understanding the fundamentals of group coordination. We believe that contact among these different perspectives is essential for continuing to expand the impact of the ecological perspective to other fields. While this multidisciplinary special issue takes an explicitly non-human view of collective behavior, we hope it will not only improve our basic understanding of inter-entity dynamics but also spark curiosity and inspire new approaches in the study of human collectives.