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Testing Message Diffusion in Harmonic Logistic Curves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Stuart Carter Dodd
Stuart Carter Dodd*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

The growth of a population of knowers of a message was studied to test a human interactance hypothesis. The conditions investigated involved people interacting in time, with the population pairing off randomly (i.e., determined by many, small, different influences) and transferring an attribute (i.e., an all-or-none act) at either a steady rate or a waning rate, subsequent to the originating stimulus. The mathematical expressions for these pre-conditions were the differential equations for the linear logistic for steady acting and the harmonic logistic for waning acting. Variant forms of these curves were developed. Two exploratory experiments, or pretests, comprised launching a coffee slogan in a town and imitating a badge wearer in a boys' camp. Since the activity rate waned harmonically in both cases, the harmonic logistic fit best in both the town and the camp as expected by the hypothesis.

Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1956 , pp. 191 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © 1956 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

*

A paper read before Section K sponsored by the Committee on Social Physics of the AAAS Conference in Boston, December 30, 1953. This research was supported in part by the United States Air Force under Contract AF 33(038)-27522, monitored by the Human Resources Research Institute (now, Officer Education Research Laboratory, Air Force Personnel and Training Research Center), Air Research and Development Command, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Permission is granted for reproduction, translation, publication and distribution in part and in whole by or for the United States Government.

†

For the Air Force, the project seeks to improve the leaflet weapon in psychological warfare. The Air Force needs to know how to maximize the desired effects of the leaflets they will drop. (and have dropped by the millions) on enemy or captive populations or on our own population in an emergency. For a published description of this project and some of its findings, see (4-9); for the interactance hypothesis and dimensional theory, a special case of which is presented in this paper, see (1-3).

References

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