IBSS: Understanding Social Diffusion Dynamics Among Networked Cognitive Systems

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This interdisciplinary research project will examine social diffusion dynamics, including both the transmission of information within social systems and the impact of those information flows on the ways that the social system functions. The project will bridge the cognitive and social sciences by providing new knowledge about the ways that ideas, beliefs, traditions, behaviors, and information in general move through social channels from person to person and create patterns of knowledge within communities, nations, and the world as a whole. Although this project will focus on the diffusion dynamics of attitudes about electronic cigarettes on Twitter, the project's approach and findings will provide new ways to consider a broader range of problems, including obesity, economic and social disparities, cyberterrorism, mass migration, and natural disasters. The project will provide new insights for many different individuals engaged who deal with issues for which the diffusion of information is critical. The project will provide valuable education and training for undergraduate and graduate students as well as post-doctoral researchers, and it will provide new tools to enhance the infrastructure for scientific inquiry in the future.The investigators will draw on theories and approaches from the psychological and cognitive sciences, which focus on how individual people's minds work, and the social sciences, which focus on the social structures that constitute an individual's social context. They will seek answers to three core questions: (1) To what degree does exposure to others' beliefs via social media channels affect change in a person's beliefs? (2) How does the spread of beliefs operate over large sociotechnical networks? (3) What is the appropriate set of computational formalisms for representing the spread of beliefs on large sociotechnical networks? They will employ a networked cognitive systems approach to analyze the diffusion dynamics of attitudes towards electronic cigarettes on Twitter, using online social experiments, data-mining techniques, and a to-scale formal computational model of a real Twitter network. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.