Abstract
The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend the concept of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment—as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter—during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time-locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention at three time scales. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient content during the debates: Across well-known remarks in each debate, mentions in social media start within 5–10 seconds after it occurs; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.
Highlights
Interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents has dramatically increased over the past couple of decades
We time-locked the corresponding Twitter data with video of each debate to match precise behaviors in the debates with the second-bysecond rate of tweets involving mentions of the candidates. With these two time series in hand, we examined whether human behavior is entrained at three different time scales: i) short-term entrainment to conversational dynamics; ii) slower entrainment to salient content of the debates; and iii) long-term entrainment to the duration of the debates
We hypothesized that the dynamics of a massively shared event—such as the 2012 US presidential debates—would be reflected in the second-by-second, larger-scale dynamics of public attention
Summary
Interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents has dramatically increased over the past couple of decades. This interest may stem in no small part from a new ability to measure and model collective behaviors. Strogatz and Stewart [1] highlight firefly behavior as illustrative of fundamental principles underlying entrained systems [2, 3]. In parts of Southeast Asia, one may happen upon a sea of fireflies, in which each firefly’s intrinsic oscillatory dynamics have become entrained to others around it. The result is PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0122742. The result is PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0122742 April 16, 2015
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