Advances in Complex Systems最新文献

Social systems are characterized by the presence of group interactions and by the existence of both trust and distrust relations. Although there is a wide literature on signed social networks, where positive signs associated to the links indicate trust, friendship, agreement, while negative signs represent distrust, antagonism, and disagreement, very little is known about the effect that signed interactions can have on the spreading of social behaviors when, not only pairwise, but also higher-order interactions are taken into account. In this paper, we introduce a model of complex contagion on signed simplicial complexes, and we investigate the role played by trust and distrust on the dynamics of a social contagion process, where exposure to multiple sources is needed for the contagion to occur. The presence of higher-order signed structures in our model naturally induces new infection and recovery mechanisms, thus increasing the richness of the contagion dynamics. Through numerical simulations and analytical results in the mean-field approximation, we show how distrust determines the way the system moves from a state where no individuals adopt the social behavior, to a state where a finite fraction of the population actively spreads it. Interestingly, we observe that the fraction of spreading individuals displays a non-monotonic dependence with respect to the average number of connections between individuals. We then investigate how social balance affects social contagion, finding that balanced triads have an ambivalent impact on the spreading process, either promoting or impeding contagion based on the relative abundance of fully trusted relations. Our results shed light on the nontrivial effect of trust on the spreading of social behaviors in systems with group interactions, paving the way to further investigations of spreading phenomena in structured populations.

The collective coordination of distributed tasks in a complex system can be represented as decision dynamics on a graph. This abstract representation allows studying the performance of local decision heuristics as a function of task complexity and network architecture. Here, we identify hard-to-solve and easy-to-solve networks in a social differentiation task within the basic model of small-world graphs. We show that, depending on the details of the decision heuristic as well as the length of the added links, shortcuts can serve as structural promotors, which speed up convergence toward a solution, but also as structural insulators, which make the network more difficult to solve. Our findings have implications for situations where, in distributed decision systems, regional solutions emerge, which are globally incompatible as, for example, during the emergence of technological standards.

Involution now refers to the phenomenon that competitors in the same field make more efforts to struggle for limited resources but get lower individual “profit effort ratio”. In this work, we investigate the evolution of the involution game when competitors in the same field can adopt not only the strategy of making more efforts but also a specialization strategy which allows competitors to devote all their efforts to part of the competitive field. Based on the existing model, we construct the involution game with the specialization strategy and simulate the evolution of it on a square lattice under different social resource, allocation parameter (characterizing the intensity of social competition), effort and other conditions. In addition, we also conduct a theoretical analysis to further understand the underlying mechanism of our model and to avoid illusive results caused by the model settings. Our main results show that, when the total effort of the specialization strategy and the ordinary strategy is equal, the group composed of all the agents has a certain probability to choose the ordinary strategy if the allocation parameter is very large (that is to say, the intensity of competition is very weak), otherwise the group will choose the specialization strategy; when the total effort of the two strategies is not equal, the proportion of the specialization strategy adoption is related to the social resource, the effort and the allocation parameter. To some extent, our study can explain why division of labor appears in human society and provide suggestions for individuals on competition strategy selection and governments on competition policy development.