Social contagion with negative feedbacks

Abstract

Real social contagion processes usually accompany feedback behaviors, such as people may give comments after they adopt a new product or watch a new movie, etc. In this paper, we extend the traditional threshold model that has been widely adopted for studying social contagion phenomena by incorporating the negative-feedback mechanism. In our model, nodes may give negative feedbacks with a certain probability after they become adopters, and correspondingly, the threshold of their susceptible neighbors will increase. By extensive simulations and mean-field analysis, we find that, if nodes give negative feedbacks with high possibility immediately after they become adopters, the contagion process could be effectively suppressed with only slight disturbances to the system, i.e., only a small fraction of nodes give negative feedbacks finally.