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When people coordinate their behaviors with their friends—e.g., choosing whether
to adopt a new technology, protest against a government, attend university—divisions
within a social network can lead to contrasting norms of behavior in different parts
of the network. We define a society's atoms to be groups of people who adopt the
same behavior in every equilibrium. We show that the atoms at least as coarse as
blocks in stochastic block models, and show that using knowledge of the atoms to
seed the diffusion of a behavior significantly increases diffusion compared to seeding
based on standard community detection algorithms.
