A model for the decline of trends, fads, and information sharing

A model of human behavior finds that people will share information if enough—but not too many—of their contacts do so. Humans are social creatures, and many behaviors and beliefs can spread from person to person. Understanding the dynamics of behavioral diffusion can help encourage healthy or sustainable behaviors or stop the spread of misinformation. Linear threshold models assume that people will adopt a behavior when the number of their social contacts that have done so passes a threshold. Pouria Ramazi and colleagues propose an addition to the model, in which people drop a behavior when the number of their contacts who have adopted the behavior passes a second threshold. Periods of decline in the adoption of innovations, fashions going out of style, and gossip becoming stale are among the reasons why a second threshold for behavioral adoption might exist. The authors test their theory using the social media conversations on Twitter (now X) around the Higgs boson and the Melbourne Cup horse race, as well as conversations in China on Weibo about the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. In each case, the bi-threshold model outperformed the linear-threshold model. According to the authors, the results confirm the existence of the second upper threshold in some contexts of diffusion of information.

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