IBSS: Understanding Social Diffusion Dynamics Among Networked Cognitive Systems

这个跨学科的研究项目将研究社会扩散动力学，包括社会系统内信息的传递和这些信息流对社会系统运作方式的影响。该项目将通过提供关于思想、信仰、传统、行为和信息一般通过社会渠道在人与人之间传播的方式的新知识，并在社区、国家和整个世界内创造知识模式，从而架起认知科学和社会科学的桥梁。虽然这个项目将重点关注Twitter上对电子烟态度的传播动态，但该项目的方法和发现将为考虑更广泛的问题提供新的方法，包括肥胖、经济和社会差距、网络恐怖主义、大规模移民和自然灾害。该项目将为从事信息传播至关重要的问题处理的许多不同的个人提供新的见解。该项目将为本科生、研究生和博士后研究人员提供有价值的教育和培训，并将为加强未来科学探究的基础设施提供新的工具。研究人员将借鉴心理学和认知科学的理论和方法，这些理论和方法关注个人的思想是如何工作的，而社会科学的理论和方法关注构成个人社会背景的社会结构。他们将寻求三个核心问题的答案：(1)通过社交媒体渠道接触他人的信仰会在多大程度上影响一个人信仰的改变？(2)信念在大型社会技术网络中的传播是如何运作的？(3)在大型社会技术网络中，代表信念传播的合适计算形式是什么？他们将采用网络认知系统方法来分析Twitter上对电子烟态度的扩散动态，使用在线社会实验、数据挖掘技术和真实Twitter网络的按比例正式计算模型。本项目由美国国家科学基金会跨学科行为与社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛资助。

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.