An example of social interaction: Spatial contagion effect in exams

José J. Arenas and Pedro Carpena

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2022, vol. 603, issue C

Abstract: In the last decades the study of collective phenomena has produced a great interest in the field of Statistical Physics within the framework of Complex Systems, being a paradigmatic example flocking, the collective motion of self-propelled organisms. Such studies have been more recently extended to collective human behavior, where social interactions are important and concepts such as ’social force’ have arisen. In this work we want to explore the possible existence of a ’social field’ in a very controlled human environment: a classroom where the students take an exam. Since the students are seated in individual tables while working in their corresponding exams, the only possible interaction occurs when the students finish the exam and deliver it to the teacher. We conjecture that the existence of social interactions could lead to a contagion effect among the students, so that a given student who delivers the exam may influence another close student to do the same, and as a result the exams are not randomly delivered in the space. In this sense, each classroom can be seen as a complex system, where there exist interactions between the different elements, the students. To show the existence of this contagion effect, we use experimental data registered in 10 high-school classrooms during different exams, and for each student we record the exam delivery time and the spatial location of the student in the classroom while taking the exam. We use the distances between students who finish the exam consecutively and compare these distances with the random expectation in the corresponding classroom using Monte Carlo simulations. We observe a significant nonrandom behavior of the experimental data, and show the existence of a clustering effect in space, supporting the existence of a contagion effect as a consequence of an underlying ’social field’. Finally, to quantify this contagion effect, we propose a probabilistic distance-driven contagion model, according to which a given student who delivers the exam may influence another student closer than a given distance to do the same with certain contagion probability. By comparing the results of the model with the experimental data, we obtain a global contagion probability of around 1/6.

Keywords: Social systems; Human interactions; Contagion effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437122004472
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:603:y:2022:i:c:s0378437122004472

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2022.127666

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().