Gossipping Until You Get Tired of It: A Network Model of the Adaptive Exchange of Rumors in a Small Scale Social Environment

The spread of rumors, otherwise known as gossiping, is an inevitable part of life for most people. Therefore, it is important to understand the way that information is actually spread through social environments of smaller proportions. This spread is modeled using a Higher-Order Adaptation Social Network, utilizing states for “people” and their boredom. Representation states for their connection weights and their speed factors are also used to represent the adaptivity of the model. Different scenarios are modeled as real-life examples to better illustrate how a rumor is spread when exposed to different groups of people. The model shows how gossip is shared whenever a new rumor presents itself, and how the cyclic nature of social environments contributes to the spread itself.