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The Opacity Problem in Social Contagion
- Publication Year :
- 2017
- Publisher :
- arXiv, 2017.
-
Abstract
- Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the inability to observe the critical level of peer influence required to trigger an individual's behavioral change. Even with maximal information, network cascades reveal intervals that bound critical levels of peer exposure, rather than critical values themselves. Existing practice uses interval maxima, which systematically over-estimates the social influence required for behavioral change. Simulations reveal that the over-estimation is likely common and large in magnitude. This is confirmed by an empirical study of hashtag cascades among 3.2 million Twitter users: one in five hashtag adoptions suffers critical value uncertainty due to the opacity problem. Different assumptions about these intervals lead to qualitatively different conclusions about the role of peer reinforcement in diffusion. We introduce a solution that combines identifying tightly bounded intervals with predicting uncertain critical values using node-level information.<br />Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables
- Subjects :
- FOS: Computer and information sciences
Physics - Physics and Society
050402 sociology
Theoretical computer science
Sociology and Political Science
Complex contagion
Opacity
Computer science
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Methodology
FOS: Physical sciences
Interval (mathematics)
Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology
C.2.1
0504 sociology
050602 political science & public administration
Point estimation
General Psychology
Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
Data collection
Node (networking)
05 social sciences
Probabilistic logic
General Social Sciences
Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
0506 political science
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies
Anthropology
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences
Threshold model
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....d655425b4d0860624507970d35deadcc
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1702.02700