The power of easy belief: How behaviors spread rapidly in two-layer networks

Abstract

In daily life, message and behavior dissemination is common. Threshold models show that individuals are more likely to adopt a behavior if the proportion of peers who have adopted it exceeds a certain threshold. People's willingness to adopt behaviors varies and is influenced by their communication channels. High network heterogeneity makes behavior spread more difficult, unlike infectious disease dynamics. Research shows that factors like initial adopter proportion, clustering coefficient, community structure, and temporal networks significantly affect behavior propagation. However, there's a gap in studying dual propagation pathways, such as through credible and skeptical channels. This paper explores the impact of skepticism threshold in skeptical pathways on final adoption rates in two-layer networks where behaviors spread via both credible and skeptical channels. Code is available at https://github.com/chumie222/Propagation-dynamics-in-complex-networks.