# life: self-reinforcing cascades: a spreading model for beliefs or products of varying intensity or quality

<< ️Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over time. However, social contagions—the spread of ideas, beliefs, innovations—can lose or gain in momentum as they spread: ideas can get reinforced, beliefs strengthened, products refined. >>

<< ️(AA) study the impacts of such self-reinforcement mechanisms in cascade dynamics. (They) use different mathematical modeling techniques to capture the recursive, yet changing nature of the process. >>

<< ️(AA) find a critical regime with a range of power-law cascade size distributions with nonuniversal scaling exponents. This regime clashes with classic models, where criticality requires fine-tuning at a precise critical point. Self-reinforced cascades produce critical-like behavior over a wide range of parameters, which may help explain the ubiquity of power-law distributions in empirical social data. >>

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Juniper Lovato, et al. Self-Reinforcing Cascades: A Spreading Model for Beliefs or Products of Varying Intensity or Quality. Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 087401. Aug 21, 2025.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/5mph-sws5

Also: behav, random, noise, walk, self-assembly, in https://www.inkgmr.net/kwrds.html 

Keywords: life, behavior, walk, random, random walks, noise, criticality, self-assembly, social contagions, self-reinforced cascades.