How heterogeneous social influence acts on human decision-making in online social networks

Social network-based tasks frequently emphasize the influence of direct neighbors on human decision-making. However, there is no objective consensus on whether direct neighbors are influential in all circumstances, or any other type of “neighbors” who have a greater impact. In this study, we investigate the patterns of heterogeneous social influence on human decision-making from the perspectives of opinions, behaviors, preferences and decision probabilities across three large-scale online networks. Our results demonstrate that the influence of similar behavior during exploration on decision-making outperforms that of explicit social relationships regardless of relationship sparsity, yet is associated with shared experiences, network structures, and individual attributes. Specifically, at low levels of experiences, similar behavior during exploration drives human behavioral shifts from bystanders to participants more effectively than explicit social relationships. Further incorporating heterogeneous influence into opinion dynamics through the matrix factorization framework, we reveal the mechanism of heterogeneous social influence acting on decision-making in online networks, with implications for understanding human decision-making.