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About the Authors:
Jean M. Carlson
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Department of Physics, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America
David L. Alderson
Affiliation: Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, United States of America
Sean P. Stromberg
Affiliation: Department of Physics, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America
Danielle S. Bassett
Affiliations Department of Physics, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America, Sage Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America
Emily M. Craparo
Affiliation: Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, United States of America
Francisco Guiterrez-Villarreal
Affiliation: Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, United States of America
Thomas Otani
Affiliation: Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, United States of America
Introduction
The development of new communication technologies enables rapid information dissemination and decision making among groups of individuals, but it also creates new challenges in the coordination of collective behavior. For example, the adoption of social networking technologies such as Twitter and Facebook can empower the masses but makes them hard to control [1]–[8]. More generally, the advent of contemporary network technologies has brought with it a new set of fragilities stemming from the complexity of human behavior: people rarely behave optimally, randomly, or uniformly, as often naively assumed in technological design and policy development.
Within the field of network science, the study of social networks plays an increasingly important role in method development and associated applications, with widespread implications in marketing, politics, education, epidemics, and disasters. Considerable effort is directed towards understanding how information diffuses through social groups [9]–[14], with particular emphasis on the role of news websites [15], blogs [16], Facebook [17], Twitter [18], and other social media [19], [20].
As information diffuses, individuals can display a range of decision making behaviors driven by new information. Phenomena of particular interest include (1) the dynamics of cascading behavior, which can explain how and why fads emerge [21] or rumors spread so quickly [22], [23], and (2) the role that individuals play as “spreaders” in facilitating the propagation of this behavior [24]–[26], or similarly the roll that “homophily” can play in abrogating uptake of a behavior [27]. Social epidemics, much like their...