Impacts of Opinion Leaders on Social Contagions

TL;DR

This paper models how opinion leaders influence social contagions, showing they facilitate behavior adoption and identifying optimal leader selection strategies using a generalized Watts threshold model.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model incorporating opinion leaders into social contagion dynamics, revealing their effects on network thresholds and adoption speed.

Findings

Opinion leaders lower the threshold for global behavior adoption.

Presence of opinion leaders accelerates behavior spread.

An optimal top h% of opinion leaders maximizes influence.

Abstract

Opinion leaders are ubiquitous in both online and offline social networks, but the impacts of opinion leaders on social behavior contagions are still not fully understood, especially by using a mathematical model. Here we generalize the classical Watts threshold model and address the influences of the opinion leaders, where an individual adopts a new behavior if one of his/her opinion leaders adopts the behavior. First, we choose the opinion leaders randomly from all individuals in the network and find the impacts of opinion leaders make other individuals adopt the behavior more easily. Specifically, the existence of opinion leaders reduces the lowest mean degree of the network required for the global behavior adoption, and increases the highest mean degree of the network that the global behavior adoption can occur. Besides, the introduction of opinion leaders accelerates the behavior adoption, but does not change the adoption order of individuals. The developed theoretical predictions agree with the simulation results. Second, we randomly choose the opinion leaders from the top h% of the highest degree individuals, and find an optimal h% for the network with the lowest mean degree that the global behavior adoption can occur. Meanwhile, the influences of opinion leaders on accelerating the adoption of behaviors become less significant and can even be ignored when reducing the value of h%.