Emergence of simple and complex contagion dynamics from weighted belief networks
arXiv:2301.02368 · doi:10.1126/sciadv.adh4439
Abstract
Social contagion is a ubiquitous and fundamental process that drives individual and social changes. Although social contagion arises as a result of cognitive processes and biases, the integration of cognitive mechanisms with the theory of social contagion remains an open challenge. In particular, studies on social phenomena usually assume contagion dynamics to be either simple or complex, rather than allowing it to emerge from cognitive mechanisms, despite empirical evidence indicating that a social system can exhibit a spectrum of contagion dynamics -- from simple to complex -- simultaneously. Here, we propose a model of interacting beliefs, from which both simple and complex contagion dynamics can organically arise. Our model also elucidates how a fundamental mechanism of complex contagion -- resistance -- can come about from cognitive mechanisms.
References in corpus (9)
- Statistical physics of social dynamics
- The science of fake news
- Universal behavior in a generalized model of contagion
- Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks
- A generalized model of social and biological contagion
- Optimal network modularity for information diffusion
- Collective dynamics of belief evolution under cognitive coherence and social conformity
- Interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement
- Cognitive cascades: How to model (and potentially counter) the spread of fake news