A behavioral reinvestigation of the effect of long ties on social contagions

2025-10-06

AI Summary

This study investigates the mechanism through which long ties—i.e., weak, cross-community connections—influence behavioral diffusion under uncertainty. Addressing contradictory findings in prior literature, the research integrates controlled laboratory experiments with agent-based network simulations grounded in individual decision-making. It incorporates psychological constructs such as risk preference and attitudes toward uncertainty to model heterogeneous adoption responses. Results show that heightened uncertainty significantly increases individuals’ reliance on social influence; at the aggregate level, long ties consistently facilitate diffusion, yet their positive effect exhibits diminishing marginal returns as uncertainty intensifies. The core contribution lies in moving beyond the conventional “simple vs. complex contagion” dichotomy: it demonstrates that heterogeneity in individuals’ responsiveness to social influence—not tie length per se—is the pivotal mechanism determining the functional role of long ties in diffusion processes.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Systems under Uncertainty
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Decision/Utility Theory
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Influence propagation, information diffusion, and the prediction on networks
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems

Abstract

Faced with uncertainty in decision making, individuals often turn to their social networks to inform their decisions. In consequence, these networks become central to how new products and behaviors spread. A key structural feature of networks is the presence of long ties, which connect individuals who share few mutual contacts. Under what conditions do long ties facilitate or hinder diffusion? The literature provides conflicting results, largely due to differing assumptions about individual decision-making. We reinvestigate the role of long ties by experimentally measuring adoption decisions under social influence for products with uncertain payoffs and embedding these decisions in network simulations. At the individual level, we find that higher payoff uncertainty increases the average reliance on social influence. However, personal traits such as risk preferences and attitudes toward uncertainty lead to substantial heterogeneity in how individuals respond to social influence. At the collective level, the observed individual heterogeneity ensures that long ties consistently promote diffusion, but their positive effect weakens as uncertainty increases. Our results reveal that the effect of long ties is not determined by whether the aggregate process is a simple or complex contagion, but by the extent of heterogeneity in how individuals respond to social influence.

Problem

• Investigating how long ties affect social contagion diffusion
• Examining individual decision heterogeneity under social influence
• Determining conditions where long ties facilitate or hinder spread

Innovation

• Experimental measurement of adoption decisions
• Network simulations embedding social influence
• Analyzing heterogeneity in social response