A meme propagation model to combine social affirmation with meme attractiveness and persistence

Aiguo Zheng, Shuangling Luo () and Haoxiang Xia
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Aiguo Zheng: School of Management Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, P. R. China
Shuangling Luo: School of Management Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, P. R. China
Haoxiang Xia: School of Management Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, P. R. China

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), 2016, vol. 27, issue 01, 1-20

Abstract: The propagation of memes on online social networks often depends on the mechanism of social affirmation. Centola termed such social-affirmation-driven diffusion as complex contagion and partly validated it through an online experiment. However, for actual online meme propagation, the mechanism of social affirmation often takes effect in combination with various other factors and mechanisms. In this paper, we examine the combinatorial effects of social affirmation and the attractiveness and persistence of the meme by proposing and analyzing a UACI model, where an agent’s activities to receive and transfer a meme is associated with the transition between its four possible states of “Uninformed”, “Attended”,“Convinced” and “Immune”. The numerical simulations illustrate nontrivial patterns of propagation. Especially, it is revealed that the effects of simple and complex contagions co-exist and equilibrate in accordance with the joint functions of meme attractiveness and social affirmation. Furthermore, the low-persistence of the meme hinders the propagation-scale more remarkably on the regular network than on the random one, indicating that the persistence may be critical for retaining complex contagion.

Keywords: Complex contagion; meme propagation; social affirmation; meme attractiveness; meme persistence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1142/S0129183116500029

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