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I thought you might be interested in two articles from a research group at Harvard. This group has adapted the susceptible–infected–susceptible (SIS) model, which has traditionally been used to study infectious disease, for use in studying social contagions. SIS was originally developed to model infectious diseases that do not confer immunity (such as many sexually transmitted diseases). The group modified the SIS model to make it more appropriate for studying social contagions by including the possibility for ‘automatic’ (or ‘spontaneous’) non-social infection (SISa). A key feature of the SISa model is its ability to characterize the relative importance of social vs non-social transmission by quantitatively comparing rates of spontaneous versus contagious infection. The authors illustrate with two social contagions – emotions and obesity.
The first article applies SISa to obesity data (published this week in PLoS Computational Biology). The model forecasts further increases in the obesity epidemic, topping out at around 42%. The second article is from July 2010 and to study the flow of emotion through large social networks. Both employ data from the Framingham Heart Study.
This work was funded in part by NIH.
Infectious Disease Modeling of Social Contagion in Networks.
Hill AL, Rand DG, Nowak MA, Christakis NA, 2010
PLoS Comput Biol 6(11): e1000968. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000968
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000968
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101104171346.htm
Emotions as infectious diseases in a large social network: the SISa model
Alison L. Hill, David G. Rand, Martin A. Nowak, Nicholas A. Christakis
Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences
Published online before print July 7, 2010, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.1217
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/07/03/rspb.2010.1217.full.html
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/contagious-emotions/
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