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Journal article

Role of activity in human dynamics

  • Zhou, Tao Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China - Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Kiet, H. A. T. Department of Physics, BK21 Physics Research Division, and Institute of Basic Science, Sungkyunkwan University Suwon, Republic of Korea
  • Kim, B. J. Department of Physics, BK21 Physics Research Division, and Institute of Basic Science, Sungkyunkwan University Suwon, Republic of Korea
  • Wang, B.-H. Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
  • Holme, P. Department of Computational Biology, School of Computer Science and Communication, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
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    26.03.2008
Published in:
  • Europhysics Letters. - 2008, vol. 82, no. 2, p. 28002
dynamics of social systems
social and economic systems
systems obeying scaling laws
English The human society is a very complex system; still, there are several non-trivial, general features. One type of them is the presence of power-law–distributed quantities in temporal statistics. In this letter, we focus on the origin of power laws in rating of movies. We present a systematic empirical exploration of the time between two consecutive ratings of movies (the interevent time). At an aggregate level, we find a monotonous relation between the activity of individuals and the power law exponent of the interevent time distribution. At an individual level, we observe a heavy-tailed distribution for each user, as well as a negative correlation between the activity and the width of the distribution. We support these findings by a similar data set from mobile phone text-message communication. Our results demonstrate a significant role of the activity of individuals on the society-level patterns of human behavior. We believe this is a common character in the interest-driven human dynamics, corresponding to (but different from) the universality classes of task-driven dynamics.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences et de médecine
Department
Département de Physique
Language
  • English
Classification
Physics
License
License undefined
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Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/300794
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