Social Influence and Bounded Rationality: Heuristic Decision Making in Complex Networks

The concept of heuristic decision making is adapted to dynamic influence processes in social networks. We report results of a set of simulations, in which we systematically varied: a) the members’ strategies for contacting fellow group members and integrating collected information, b) the steepness of status distributions in a network, and c) the clustering structure of the members’ communication network. The results indicate that the contact and decision rules used by the members of the network affect group level outcomes and furthermore interact with both steepness of the group’s status distribution and clustering of its communication network.