Beyond Contagion: Reality Mining Reveals Complex Patterns of Social Influence

Abstract

Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people’s behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is sufficient to fully characterize the complex dynamics of psychological states in a social context. Using wearable sensors that capture daily face-to-face interaction, combined with three daily experience sampling surveys, we collected the most comprehensive data set of personality and emotion dynamics of an entire community of work. From this high-resolution data about actual (rather than self-reported) face-to-face interaction, a complex picture emerges where contagion (that can be seen as adaptation of behavioral responses to the behavior of other people) cannot fully capture the dynamics of transitory states. We found that social influence has two opposing effects on states: adaptation effects that go beyond mere contagion, and complementarity effects whereby individuals’ behaviors tend to complement the behaviors of others. Surprisingly, these effects can exhibit completely different directions depending on the stable personality or emotional dispositions (stable traits) of target individuals. Our findings provide a foundation for richer models of social dynamics, and have implications on organizational engineering and workplace well-being.

Statistical physics of vaccination

“…Moreover, the contagion metaphor comes naturally to investigators experienced in modelling contagious diseases. However, the downside of such metaphor is that it runs the risk of being too facile for some applications, by ignoring important subtleties of real-world social behavior [408]. For instance, some social science literature distinguishes between descriptive and injunctive social norms [409].…”

“…It is not immediately clear how the contagion metaphor applies to these nuanced distinctions of how we learn ideas and behaviors from others. Indeed, empirical research seems to indicate that the contagion metaphor (unsurprisingly) is not universally applicable [408]. Moreover, many of the usual criticisms of memetics also apply to using the contagion metaphor for the spread of ideas [411].…”

Social Influence: From Contagion to a Richer Causal Understanding

“…the direct causal effect of person j's performing of action Y , Y j,t−1 , on person i's subsequent performing of the same action, Y i,t , represented by the arrow Y j,t−1 →Y i,t : person i performs action Y because person j's example inspired them to do the same. 2 Homophily introduces a backdoor path between Y i,t and Y i,t−1 through the latent X i and X j :…”

“…because j's way of engagement with Y was against i's values, or whether i does not take substantive action in relation to Y , e.g. out of loss of interest [2]. For instance, Facebook's addition of specific reaction buttons for love, anger, etc to the Like button (which was previously used to express any type of reaction) [27], is one approach to capturing direction.…”

“…This has led to social influence becoming an increasingly prominent topic of study in the field of computer science, as well as to the birth of the interdisciplinary field of computational social science [33] for which methods need to be developed for systematically combining the social and the computational sciences [18,34,48]. Understanding social influence is pivotal since it has been claimed that social influence drives the spread of behaviors and attitudes as diverse as smoking, obesity, happiness, and political participation along social ties, in a process analogous to the contagious spread of viruses [2,5,17,29,31,36], to the extent that ensuring a select few trend-setting individuals (the so-called 'influentials') adopt a behavior would suffice to lead a large population to follow their example and also adopt this behavior. If social influence does operate in this manner, then harnessing its power would bring immense benefits to marketing, public policy, and public health interventions.…”