Illustrating “following the crowd” at Cornell
Whether we realize it or not, the behavior of others greatly influences the decisions we make in our daily lives. Being a part of a social group stems from human nature: people want to “follow the crowd” because it can be informational, like a long line in a restaurant hinting at how good the food is, they can receive some sort of direct benefit, or they believe it is the social norm. In the context of our networks course, we discussed how certain behaviors spread within a social group as well as the likelihood that those behaviors would spread to others.
To demonstrate this concept in a more applicable way to the Cornell student population, let’s say that a group of 8 friends at Cornell tend to go to the library to study only on the weekends. Let’s call this behavior of going to the library on the weekend behavior A. After this behavior has been around for a while, one of the friends in the group, let’s call them Sarah, decides that she want to study every day after dinner instead. Let’s call this new behavior of studying after dinner behavior B. Determining which friends in the group will or will not convert to Sarah’s new behavior depends on the threshold value q. The threshold value basically says that any person will switch to the new behavior if a certain percentage of the person’s neighbors have adopted the new behavior. For example, if the threshold value = 0.4, then that means that a person that has the old behavior will adopt the new behavior if at least 40% of their neighbors adopted the new behavior, with the number of neighbors dictated by connections to the person. Simply put, if Sarah has a connection with another friend Billy, that only has one other connection, then 50% of Billy’s connections will have the behavior, so he will adopt behavior B as well. If each person in the group is only connected to one other person in the group, then the behavior will spread to the rest of the group members. However, in a more likely scenario, friends within a group will all be connected to each other by multiple edges, meaning that if more people already practice behavior A, then it will be harder to adopt behavior B since A is more popular. For example, if another member of the group, let’s call them Harry, has connections with 3 other people (including Sarah), then only 33% of his neighbors have behavior, so it won’t spread to him. This example I have provided demonstrates how a behavior can either be adopted or not within a friend group, giving an idea for how it happens in daily life.
This course has revealed to me how interconnected we are as a society and how quickly information, behaviors, and ideas can spread. I never really thought about it as in depth as this course has taught me, but I can now identify it in my own personal life as well as educate others about it.