Download or read book Belief Diffusion in Social Networks written by Patrick Girard and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We report the results of a laboratory experiment investigating propagation of beliefs in a social network. During the experiment, participants faced several questions having objectively correct answers and could update their answers several times based on aggregate information about answers chosen by their neighbours. One of the novelties of the experiment was that the binary choices faced by participants were augmented to include an “I do not know” option and incentives to choose it when they felt indifferent between the actual options. We observe that the dynamics of decisions in the network strongly depends on the question type, logical or factual. The results also indicate that propagation of beliefs can be more accurately described by a threshold model rather than models of probabilistic contagion. However, in contrast with assumptions underlying standard threshold models, our results suggest that it is not the larger proportion of neighbours that is driving participants' choices but the difference between the proportions of neighbours opting for the competing options.