Competition between simple and complex contagion on temporal networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how simple and complex contagion mechanisms influence behavioral spreading on temporal networks, proposing analytical methods to identify dominant processes without prior knowledge of individual behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces methods to distinguish between simple, complex, and mixed contagion dynamics in temporal networks, advancing understanding of social contagion processes.

Findings

Analytical methods effectively identify contagion dominance transitions.

Numerical simulations validate the proposed analytical approaches.

Insights into social contagion dynamics without prior individual mechanism knowledge.

Abstract

Behavioral adoptions are influenced by peers in different ways. While some individuals may change after a single incoming influence, others need multiple cumulated attempts. These two mechanism, known as the simple and the complex contagions, often occur together in social phenomena alongside personal factors determining individual adoptions. Here we aim to identify which of these contagion mechanism dominate a spreading process propagated by time-varying interactions. We consider three types of spreading scenarios: ones pre-dominated by simple or complex contagion, and mixed dynamics where the dominant mechanism changes during the unfolding of the spreading process. We propose different methods to analytically identify the transitions between these three scenarios and compare them with numerical simulations. This work offers new insights into social contagion dynamics on temporal networks, without assuming prior knowledge about individual's contagion mechanism driving their adoption decisions.