Effect of Network Structure and Committed Minority Placement in Promoting Social Diffusion

Social diffusion is the phenomenon whereby a population collectively adopts a novel (alternative) behavior, opinion, product, or technology to replace an existing status quo. Often the process is driven by a small number of individuals, termed committed minority, who stubbornly promote the alternative. In this work, we use an experimentally proven game-theoretic agent-based model to explore how social diffusion is influenced by the network of social interactions, the placement of committed minority, and the timing that committed minority are introduced into the network. Through a campaign of Monte Carlo simulations, we find that diffusion occurs quicker on sparse and highly clustered networks. In addition, we show that placing the committed minority at nodes with the highest Bonacich centrality with a negative attenuation factor seems to be the best approach for facilitating diffusion. Then, we find that the timing of introducing committed minority has a negligible effect on the diffusion process. Finally, our findings are tested and confirmed on two case studies of real-world networks.