Abstract
The network-based model of social contagion has revolved around information on local interactions; its central focus has been on network topological properties shaping the local interactions and, ultimately, social contagion outcomes. We extend this approach by introducing information on the global state, or global information, into the network-based model and analyzing how it alters social contagion dynamics in six different classes of networks: a two-dimensional square lattice, small-world networks, Erdős-Rényi networks, regular random networks, Holme-Kim networks, and Barabási-Albert networks. We find that there is an optimal amount of global information that minimizes the time to reach global cascades in highly clustered networks. We also find that global information prolongs the time to hit the tipping point but substantially compresses the time to reach global cascades after then, so that the overall time to reach global cascades can even be shortened under certain conditions. Finally, we show that random links substitute for global information in regulating the social contagion dynamics.
Highlights
Social contagion is commonplace in our daily lives
We examine the effects of global information on the social contagion dynamics and attendant outcomes, which answers the recent call for looking beyond pairwise local interactions in investigating network dynamics [31,32,33,34,35]
Our results show that the more social agents refer to global information than local information, the slower the social contagion process in most networks
Summary
People decide whether or not to adopt new ideas, beliefs, rumors, norms, business practices, technological standards, or fashion trends [1, 2] When making this sort of decision, they as cognitive social agents actively refer to or are passively influenced by their neighbors’ decisions [3]. Random links (i.e., edges connecting pairs of nodes chosen uniformly at random, be they rewired or newly added) or hubs that dramatically expedite global diffusion may serve as a functional substitute for global information [37, 38] With this possibility in mind, we consider various classes of networks along the dimensions of local clustering, randomness, and scale-freeness. Random links substitute for global information in the social contagion process
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