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arXiv 0912.0045physics.soc-ph
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在线系统中社会影响力的自发涌现

The Spontaneous Emergence of Social Influence in Online Systems

J. -P. Onnela, F. Reed-Tsochas

摘要:

社会影响力驱动着离线和在线的人类行为。它渗透到文化市场,并表现在采用科学和技术创新以及传播社会实践。以往关于创新在空间区域或社交网络中传播的实证研究主要集中在一种特定技术在所有潜在采用者的子集中的传播。也很难确定观察到的集体行为是由自然影响过程驱动的,还是遵循媒体或营销活动等外部信号。在这里,我们选择了一个在线环境,使我们能够通过跟踪社交网站的用户群安装的一整套应用程序的流行程度来研究社会影响过程,从而捕捉在这种情况下可以相互影响的所有个人的行为。通过扩展标准的波动标度方法,我们分析了1亿应用程序安装引起的集体行为,并表明系统中出现了两种不同的行为机制。一旦应用程序跨越了特定的流行度阈值,社会影响过程就会在用户中引发高度相关的采用行为,这会推动一些应用程序达到非凡的流行程度。在这个门槛之下,社会影响的集体效应似乎几乎完全消失,这在线下世界中是没有观察到的。我们的研究结果表明,即使没有外部信号,社会影响力也可以在数字环境中自发地呈现出开关性质。如果同样的实验条件可以复制,那么在离线世界中是否可以观察到类似的结果还有待观察。

英文摘要:

Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on the diffusion of innovations in spatial regions or social networks has largely focused on the spread of one particular technology among a subset of all potential adopters. It has also been difficult to determine whether the observed collective behaviour is driven by natural influence processes, or whether it follows external signals such as media or marketing campaigns. Here, we choose an online context that allows us to study social influence processes by tracking the popularity of a complete set of applications installed by the user population of a social networking site, thus capturing the behaviour of all individuals who can influence each other in this context. By extending standard fluctuation scaling methods, we analyse the collective behaviour induced by 100 million application installations, and show that two distinct regimes of behaviour emerge in the system. Once applications cross a particular threshold of popularity, social influence processes induce highly correlated adoption behaviour among the users, which propels some of the applications to extraordinary levels of popularity. Below this threshold, the collective effect of social influence appears to vanish almost entirely in a manner that has not been observed in the offline world. Our results demonstrate that even when external signals are absent, social influence can spontaneously assume an on-off nature in a digital environment. It remains to be seen whether a similar outcome could be observed in the offline world if equivalent experimental conditions could be replicated.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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