Lustick, Miodownik / Neighborhoods and Tips
3
as the uninterrupted movement of a system from a stable state along some vector of
cascading transformation to a subsequent stable state that is substantially different from
its original condition.
1
Let us be clear about our terminology. Since spatiality refers to the smallness of
the particular subgroup individuals use as their reference group or zone of information,
greater spatiality therefore means a smaller, more “parochial,” zone of knowledge. A
social array characterized by less spatiality would entail monitoring by each individual of
a larger subset of the total population of other individuals. Spatiality thereby refers to the
amount of access that individuals have to information about the entire population –
information based on monitoring of specific subsets of that population rather than on
parametric information about the population as a whole. Someone's zone of
knowledge,or social "neighborhood," reflects the subset of the population with which a
person has more regular and intense contact, regardless of whether that contact is a
function of physical proximity.
2
Existing approaches have explored the implications of a variety of factors, some
at the level of attributes of individuals and some at the level of populations, for the
possibility or likelihood of political cascades. These factors include spatiality and local
knowledge, general cognitive limits, variability of preferences across time, and degrees
and distributions of preferences, accuracy of beliefs, heterogeneity across participants in
a social field, updating rules for agents, size of exogenously provided payoffs for a
particular behavior, shapes and sizes of network topologies, and patterns of
connectedness within and among sub-networks within a social field.
3
Convention