Social Fragmentation Transitions in Large-Scale Parameter Sweep Simulations of Adaptive Social Networks

Abstract: Social fragmentation transition is a transition of social states between many disconnected communities with distinct opinions and a well-connected single network with homogeneous opinions. This is a timely research topic with high relevance to various current societal issues. We had previously studied this problem using numerical simulations of adaptive social network models and found that two individual behavioral traits, homophily and attention to novelty, had the most statistically significant impact on the outcomes of social network evolution. However, our previous study was limited in terms of the range of parameter values examined, and possible interactions between multiple behavioral traits were largely ignored. In this study, we conducted a substantially larger-scale parameter sweep numerical experiment of the same model with expanded parameter ranges by an order of magnitude in each parameter dimension, resulting in a total of 116,640 simulation runs. To capture nontrivial interactions among behavioral parameters, we modeled and visualized the dependence of outcome measures on the model parameters using artificial neural networks. Results show that, while the competition between homophily and attention to novelty is still the primary determinant of social fragmentation, another transition plane emerges when individuals have strong social conformity behavior, which was not previously known. This implies that social fragmentation transition can also occur in the homophily-social conformity trade-off, the two behavioral traits that have very similar microscopic individual-level effects but produce very different macroscopic collective-level outcomes, illustrating the nontrivial macroscopic dynamics of complex collective systems.