Mnemonic Diffusion: An Agent-Based Modeling Investigation of Collective Memory

Past research has uncovered evidence of social influences on a wide variety of behaviors. Everything from our choice of clothing to smoking appears to be shaped by the people we know. However, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie these influences. Here, we report a series of agentbased simulations demonstrating that information diffuses across social networks in much the same way that behavior diffuses. These findings lead us to conclude that many previously observed social influences on behavior likely rely on a substrate of information transmission and representation.

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