The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the underlying structural segregation, making it epiphenomenal to the pre-existing segregated structure. On the other hand, arguing culture doesn't spread like a virus, an alternative called associative diffusion was proposed, in which cultural transmission occurs not at the preference of practices, but at the association between practices. The associative diffusion model then successfully explains cultural variation without attributing it to a segregated social structure. The contagion model and associative diffusion model require different types of relationships and interactions to make cultural transmission possible. In reality, both types of relationships exist. In light of this concern, we proposed combining the two models with the multilayer network framework. On one layer, agents casually observed the behaviors of others, updating their belief about the association between practices; on another layer, agents' preference of practices are directly influenced by closed others. In the meantime, the constraint satisfaction between preference and association is used to link the update of both, thereby making each individual a coherent entity in terms of preference and association. Using this approach, we entangle the effect of social contagion and associative diffusion through multilayer networks. For the baseline, we explore the model dynamics on three common network models: fully connected, small-world, and scale-free. The results show nontrivial dynamics between the two extremes of the contagion model and the associative diffusion model, justifying our claim that it is necessary to consider the two models at the same time.

中文翻译：

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多层网络中的社会传染和联想扩散

文化变异如何出现的问题引起了社会学研究的极大兴趣。社会学家主要通过社会传染的视角研究这种变异，这主要将文化变异归因于潜在的结构隔离，使其成为预先存在的隔离结构的附带现象。另一方面，争论文化不会像病毒一样传播，提出了一种称为关联传播的替代方案，其中文化传播的发生不是基于实践的偏好，而是基于实践之间的关联。然后，联想扩散模型成功地解释了文化变异，而无需将其归因于隔离的社会结构。传染模型和联想扩散模型需要不同类型的关系和相互作用才能使文化传播成为可能。实际上，两种类型的关系都存在。鉴于此，我们建议将这两种模型与多层网络框架相结合。在一层，代理会随意观察他人的行为，更新他们对实践之间关联的信念；另一方面，代理人对实践的偏好直接受到封闭他人的影响。同时，利用偏好和关联之间的约束满足来链接两者的更新，从而使每个个体在偏好和关联方面成为一个连贯的实体。使用这种方法，我们通过多层网络来纠缠社会传染和联想扩散的影响。对于基线，我们探索了三种常见网络模型的模型动态：全连接、小世界和无标度。结果显示了传染模型和关联扩散模型的两个极端之间的非平凡动态，证明了我们有必要同时考虑这两个模型的主张。