Interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement

Abstract

From fake news to innovative technologies, many contagions spread via a process of social reinforcement, where multiple exposures are distinct from prolonged exposure to a single source. Contrarily, biological agents such as Ebola or measles are typically thought to spread as simple contagions. Here, we demonstrate that interacting simple contagions are indistinguishable from complex contagions. In the social context, our results highlight the challenge of identifying and quantifying mechanisms, such as social reinforcement, in a world where an innumerable amount of ideas, memes and behaviors interact. In the biological context, this parallel allows the use of complex contagions to effectively quantify the non-trivial interactions of infectious diseases.

arXiv commentSupplementary Material containing details of our simulation and inference procedures is available as an ancillary file

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• Emergence of simple and complex contagion dynamics from weighted belief networks
• Competition, Collaboration, and Optimization in Multiple Interacting Spreading Processes
• Threshold cascade dynamics on coevolving networks
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• Homophily Within and Across Groups
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• Coevolutionary Dynamics of Group Interactions: Coevolving Nonlinear Voter Models
• Upper Bounds on Overshoot in SIR Models with Nonlinear Incidence
• Reconstructing networks from simple and complex contagions
• One pathogen does not an epidemic make: A review of interacting contagions, diseases, beliefs, and stories