The Impact of Heterogeneous Thresholds on Social Contagion with Multiple Initiators

The threshold model is a simple but classic model of contagion spreading in complex social systems. To capture the complex nature of social influencing we investigate numerically and analytically the transition in the behavior of threshold-limited cascades in the presence of multiple initiators as t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-11, Vol.10 (11), p.e0143020-e0143020
Main Authors: Karampourniotis, Panagiotis D, Sreenivasan, Sameet, Szymanski, Boleslaw K, Korniss, Gyorgy
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Applied physics
Astronomy
Cascades
Clinical trials
Evaluation
Heuristic
Humans
Initiators
Mathematical models
Models, Theoretical
Normal distribution
Peer relationships
Phase transitions
Primary health care
Public Opinion
Science
Social Behavior
Social Networking
Social networks
Thresholds
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Summary:The threshold model is a simple but classic model of contagion spreading in complex social systems. To capture the complex nature of social influencing we investigate numerically and analytically the transition in the behavior of threshold-limited cascades in the presence of multiple initiators as the distribution of thresholds is varied between the two extreme cases of identical thresholds and a uniform distribution. We accomplish this by employing a truncated normal distribution of the nodes' thresholds and observe a non-monotonic change in the cascade size as we vary the standard deviation. Further, for a sufficiently large spread in the threshold distribution, the tipping-point behavior of the social influencing process disappears and is replaced by a smooth crossover governed by the size of initiator set. We demonstrate that for a given size of the initiator set, there is a specific variance of the threshold distribution for which an opinion spreads optimally. Furthermore, in the case of synthetic graphs we show that the spread asymptotically becomes independent of the system size, and that global cascades can arise just by the addition of a single node to the initiator set.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0143020