Role-aware conformity influence modeling and analysis in social networks

Conformity influence is the inclination of a person to be influenced by others. In this paper, we study how the conformity tendency of a person changes with her role, as defined by her structural properties in a social network. We first formalize conformity influence using a utility function based on the conformity theory from social psychology, and then propose a probabilistic graphical model, referred to as Role-Conformity Model (RCM), for modeling the role-aware conformity influence between users by incorporating the utility function. We apply the proposed RCM to several academic research networks, and discover that people with higher degree and lower clustering coefficient are more likely to conform to others.We also evaluate RCM through the task of word usage prediction in academic publications, and show significant improvements over baseline models.