The effect of social influence on agent specialization in small-world social networks

Author(s):  
Denton Cockburn ◽  
Ziad Kobti
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5513
Author(s):  
Iljana Schubert ◽  
Judith I. M. de Groot ◽  
Adrian C. Newton

This study examines the influence of social network members (versus strangers) on sustainable food consumption choices to investigate how social influence can challenge the status quo in unsustainable consumption practices. We hypothesized that changes to individual consumption practices could be achieved by revealing ‘invisible’ descriptive and injunctive social norms. We further hypothesized that it matters who reveals these norms, meaning that social network members expressing their norms will have a stronger influence on other’s consumption choices than if these norms are expressed by strangers. We tested these hypotheses in a field experiment (N = 134), where participants discussed previous sustainable food consumption (revealing descriptive norms) and its importance (revealing injunctive norms) with either a stranger or social network member. We measured actual sustainable food consumption through the extent to which participants chose organic over non-organic consumables during the debrief. Findings showed that revealed injunctive norms significantly influenced food consumption, more so than revealed descriptive norms. We also found that this influence was stronger for social network members compared to strangers. Implications and further research directions in relation to how social networks can be used to evoke sustainable social change are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanhua Tian

Power law degree distribution, the small world property, and bad spectral expansion are three of the most important properties of On-line Social Networks (OSNs). We sampled YouTube and Wikipedia to investigate OSNs. Our simulation and computational results support the conclusion that OSNs follow a power law degree distribution, have the small world property, and bad spectral expansion. We calculated the diameters and spectral gaps of OSNs samples, and compared these to graphs generated by the GEO-P model. Our simulation results support the Logarithmic Dimension Hypothesis, which conjectures that the dimension of OSNs is m = [log N]. We introduced six GEO-P type models. We ran simulations of these GEO-P-type models, and compared the simulated graphs with real OSN data. Our simulation results suggest that, except for the GEO-P (GnpDeg) model, all our models generate graphs with power law degree distributions, the small world property, and bad spectral expansion.


Author(s):  
Dmitry Zinoviev

The issue of information diffusion in small-world social networks was first systematically brought to light by Mark Granovetter in his seminal paper “The Strength of Weak Ties” in 1973 and has been an area of active academic studies in the past three decades. This chapter discusses information proliferation mechanisms in massive online social networks (MOSN). In particular, the following aspects of information diffusion processes are addressed: the role and the strategic position of influential spreaders of information; the pathways in the social networks that serve as conduits for communication and information flow; mathematical models describing proliferation processes; short-term and long-term dynamics of information diffusion, and secrecy of information diffusion.


Author(s):  
James Dooley ◽  
Andrea Zisman ◽  
George Spanoudakis

A Virtual Organisation in large-scale distributed systems is a set of individuals and/or institutions with some common purposes or interests that need to share their resources to further their objectives, which is similar to a human community in social networks that consists of people have common interests or goals. Due to the similarity between social networks and Grids, the concepts in social science (e.g. small world phenomenon) can be adopted for the design of new generation Grid systems. This chapter presents a Small World Architecture for Effective Virtual Organisations (SWEVO) for Grid resource discovery in Virtual Organisations, which enables Virtual Organisations working in a more collaborative manner to support decision makers. In SWEVO, Virtual Organisations are connected by a small number of interorganisational links. Not every local network node needs to be connected to remote Virtual Organisations, but every network node can efficiently find connections to specific Virtual Organisations.


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