Abstract
Large-scale transitions in societies are associated with both individual behavioural change and restructuring of the social network. These two factors have often been considered independently, yet recent advances in social network research challenge this view. Here we show that common features of societal marginalization and clustering emerge naturally during transitions in a co-evolutionary adaptive network model. This is achieved by explicitly considering the interplay between individual interaction and a dynamic network structure in behavioural selection. We exemplify this mechanism by simulating how smoking behaviour and the network structure get reconfigured by changing social norms. Our results are consistent with empirical findings: The prevalence of smoking was reduced, remaining smokers were preferentially connected among each other and formed increasingly marginalized clusters. We propose that self-amplifying feedbacks between individual behaviour and dynamic restructuring of the network are main drivers of the transition. This generative mechanism for co-evolution of individual behaviour and social network structure may apply to a wide range of examples beyond smoking.
Highlights
Between individuals depend on their relationship, i.e., perceived friendship status, which suggests nonlinear interdependencies between network dynamics and social interaction[20]
To evaluate our co-evolutionary model of behaviour selection, we gradually modified the exogenous smoking disposition and studied the response of several metrics of our social adaptive network. These metrics were motivated by previous empirical studies that documented co-evolution between behaviour and social network structure and include the prevalence of smokers in the network, the eigenvector centrality of each individual and the probability that an individual smokes given that her contacts smoke
We found that models considering social influence dynamics reduced the smoking prevalence twice as much as the network model (Fig. 3), in which agent’s behaviour is determined solely by the exogenous smoking disposition
Summary
Between individuals depend on their relationship, i.e., perceived friendship status, which suggests nonlinear interdependencies between network dynamics and social interaction[20]. Opinion formation and imitation have been advocated as candidate mechanisms of behaviour induction[21,22] This puts emphasis on cognitive processes and biases for selective spread of behaviours in social networks[23,24]. These findings motivate process-based techniques for modelling dynamical social networks highlighting time-varying aspects of social connections[25]. Based on a detailed long-term survey, they analysed smoking habits of 12,067 inhabitants of a small town in the US between 1971 and 2003 while concomitantly tracking their social relationship structure, i.e., mutual assessment of friendship status Their analysis revealed that over that time period, the prevalence of smoking declined from about 50% to about 10%. Individuals who did not adapt to the decreasing societal support for smoking preferentially interacted with similar individuals, forming subgroups or clusters of increasingly marginalized smokers
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