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The Impact of Heterogeneous Thresholds on Social Contagion with Multiple Initiators

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  • Panagiotis D Karampourniotis
  • Sameet Sreenivasan
  • Boleslaw K Szymanski
  • Gyorgy Korniss

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Panagiotis D Karampourniotis & Sameet Sreenivasan & Boleslaw K Szymanski & Gyorgy Korniss, 2015. "The Impact of Heterogeneous Thresholds on Social Contagion with Multiple Initiators," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(11), pages 1-15, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0143020
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0143020
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    Cited by:

    1. Cui, Yajuan & Wei, Ruichen & Tian, Yang & Tian, Hui & Zhu, Xuzhen, 2022. "Information propagation influenced by individual fashion-passion trend on multi-layer weighted network," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    2. Peng, Hao & Peng, Wangxin & Zhao, Dandan & Wang, Wei, 2020. "Impact of the heterogeneity of adoption thresholds on behavior spreading in complex networks," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 386(C).
    3. Yang, Qiwen & Zhu, Xuzhen & Tian, Yang & Wang, Guanglu & Zhang, Yuexia & Chen, Lei, 2021. "The influence of heterogeneity of adoption thresholds on limited information spreading," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 411(C).
    4. Ruan, Zhongyuan & Zhang, Lina & Shu, Xincheng & Xuan, Qi, 2022. "Social contagion with negative feedbacks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 608(P1).

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