Social reinforcement inducing discontinuous spreading in complex networks

Social reinforcement originating from memory is the key characteristic of behavioral adoption in social contagion. Here, we introduce a non-Markovian susceptible-adopted-recovered (SAR) model to incorporate the memory mechanism. The higher the number of accumulated pieces of exposures an individual is exposed to, the larger is the probability that he/she will adopt the behavior. We observed that when the adopting probability per piece of behavioral information was smaller than a critical value, the final adoption size increased with the behavioral information probability discontinuously. Otherwise, the final adoption size increased with the behavioral information probability continuously. A physical understanding of the mechanism inducing discontinuous spreading was obtained through an edge-based compartment method, which also matched well with the simulation results. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2020