Dresden 2020 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 14: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Formation
SOE 14.3: Talk
Thursday, March 19, 2020, 12:00–12:15, GÖR 226
A network-based microfoundation of Granovetter's threshold model for social tipping — •Marc Wiedermann1, E. Keith Smith2, Jobst Heitzig1, and Jonathan F. Donges1,3 — 1Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany — 2GESIS -- Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany — 3Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm, Sweden
Social tipping, where minorities trigger larger populations to engage in collective action, has been suggested as one key aspect in addressing contemporary global challenges, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Here, we refine Granovetter's widely acknowledged theoretical threshold model of collective behavior as a numerical modelling tool for understanding social tipping processes and resolve issues that so far have hindered such applications. Based on real-world observations and social movement theory, we group the population into certain or potential actors, such that -- in contrast to its original formulation -- the model predicts non-trivial final shares of acting individuals. Then, we use a network cascade model to explain and analytically derive that previously hypothesized broad threshold distributions emerge if individuals become active via social interaction. Thus, through intuitive parameters and low dimensionality our refined model is adaptable to explain the likelihood of engaging in collective behavior where social tipping like processes emerge as saddle-node bifurcations and hysteresis.