Abstract for: Network propagation of connected ideas

In his classic work on collective behavior, Granovetter explicitly excludes the question of ‘how individuals happen to have the preferences they do’ for participation in social contagion. This paper suggests that the individual characteristics driving adoption of ideas are themselves a product of social influence, and that by allowing that ideas have meaning only in relationship to one another, this constructive process can be fruitfully explored. This paper presents a highly-simplified formalization of relationships between ideas diffusing on a social network to show how semantic network edge propagation may be responsible for the macro-level phenomena of factionalism in well-connected graphs under simple contagion.