Abstract:

Human cultural evolution relies on the spread of complex social contagions - such as linguistic categories and behavioral norms - that require sustained reinforcement by multiple contacts in a social network. In this work, we propose a novel modeling technique that allows us to take any social network and identify the pathways through which complex contagions are most likely to flow, as well as the network regions (i.e., structural attractors) that complex contagions are most likely to flow toward. This technique identifies the global directional flow dynamics for social contagions in any given network, and thus identifies the core structural backbone for how cultural innovations will rise and spread in a population. We further show how our method allows us to pinpoint which actors and communities in a network are most essential in accelerating the spread of complex contagions, and by consequence, which network regions would be most disruptive to the spread of complex contagions if these network regions were eroded or rewired. To demonstrate, we simulate a range of intervention strategies which show how we can systematically accelerate or halt the spread of complex contagions through targeted network ablations or pruning. Based on these findings, we characterize a class of strategies for controlling and optimizing the spread of complex contagions and thereby processes of cultural evolution. Implications for the origins and future of human cultural evolution are discussed.

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