Interdependent Diffusion: The social contagion of interacting beliefs

Social contagion is the process in which people adopt a belief, idea, or practice from a neighbor and pass it along to someone else. For over 100 years, scholars of social contagion have almost exclusively made the same implicit assumption: that only one belief, idea, or practice spreads through the population at a time. It is a default assumption that we don't bother to state, let alone justify. The assumption is so ingrained that our literature doesn't even have a word for "whatever is to be diffused", because we have never needed to discuss more than one of them. But this assumption is obviously false. Millions of beliefs, ideas, and practices (let's call them "diffusants") spread through social contagion every day. To assume that diffusants spread one at a time - or more generously, that they spread independently of one another - is to assume that interactions between diffusants have no influence on adoption patterns. This could be true, or it could be wildly off the mark. We've never stopped to find out. This paper makes a direct comparison between the spread of independent and interdependent beliefs using simulations, observational data, and a 2400-subject laboratory experiment. I find that in assuming independence between diffusants, scholars have overlooked social processes that fundamentally change the outcomes of social contagion. Interdependence between beliefs generates polarization, irrespective of social network structure, homophily, demographics, politics, or any other commonly cited cause. It also coordinates structures of beliefs that can have both internal justification and social support without any grounding in external truth.