Green Monkey Dreams

I’ve been working on a model of social interactions recently.I’m trying to see what happens when 1) your friends influence what you believe and 2) what you believe influences how many friends you have.

It’s an analytical / simulation combo, I’ve been trying to work it out algabraicly, on paper, and I’ve built a computer simulation too - I’m hoping each helps me figure out how to solve/interpret the other.

I’ve been struggling with it for a few weeks now, being on the brink of things but making very, very slow progress in the last few critical steps. Tonight, with a momentary insight of my young lady, I made a breakthrough. It rested on the simple (obvious in retrospect) fact that the number of friends I have is the same number as the number of people who have me as a friend. This little fact let me collapse two variables into one and suddenly all the little pieces (that had seemed to so nearly fit together) collapsed into place. It was very exciting.

Sometimes you just need to step away from the frustrating tangle of knots and get a new perspective.

The provisional conclusions of the model seem to be, if people are influences with friends:

• whichever belief occupies the minds of the people with the most friends will spread, and (more interestingly)
• positive assortment among people with minority views (i.e. minority folk liking to be friends with minority folk) can only slow, not reverse this trend, unless
• there’s a belief-dependent bias in influence: if people with a certain belief tend to have more influence on what their friends believe (perhaps because they’ve fewer friends and can invest more in each of them) - which is exactly what my follow-up simulation explores.

Fun, fun, fun! This is my first completely solo modelling project. It’s simple and has been hard, but I conceived, designed and solved it myself from scratch. I’m very proud of the little fellow!!