  The aim of this work is to implement a statistical mechanics theory of social
interaction, generalizing econometric discrete choice models. A class of simple
mean field discrete models is introduced and discussed both from the
theoretical and phenomenological point of view. We propose a parameter
evaluation procedure and test it by fitting our model against three families of
data coming from different cases: the estimated interaction parameters are
found to have similar positive values establishing a quantitative confirmation
of the peer imitation behavior found in social psychology. Moreover all the
values of the interaction parameters belong to the phase transition regime
suggesting its possible role in the study of social systems.
