Hipsters and the cool: A game theoretic analysis of identity expression, trends, and fads.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cultural trends and popularity cycles can be observed all around us, yet our theories of social influence and identity expression do not explain what perpetuates these complex, often unpredictable social dynamics. We propose a theory of social identity expression based on the opposing, but not mutually exclusive, motives to conform and to be unique among one's neighbors in a social network. We find empirical evidence for both conformity and uniqueness motives in an analysis of the popularity of given names. Generalizing across forms of identity expression, we then model the social dynamics that arise from these motives. We find that the dynamics typically enter random walks or stochastic limit cycles rather than converging to a static equilibrium. The dynamics also exhibit momentum, preserve diversity, and usually produce more conformity between neighbors, in line with empirical stylized facts. We also prove that without social network structure or, alternatively, without the uniqueness motive, reasonable adaptive dynamics would necessarily converge to equilibrium. Thus, we show that nuanced psychological assumptions (recognizing preferences for uniqueness along with conformity) and realistic social network structure are both critical to our account of the emergence of complex, unpredictable cultural trends. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".