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New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases be used to improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior--in voting, health, technology, and finance- occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions accelerating the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors.
About the author
Damon Centola
Summary
A new, counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behavior
New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases be used to improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior--in voting, health, technology, and finance—occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions accelerating the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors.
While it is commonly believed that "weak ties"—long-distance connections linking acquaintances—lead to the quicker spread of behaviors, in fact the exact opposite holds true. Centola demonstrates how the most well-known, intuitive ideas about social networks have caused past diffusion efforts to fail, and how such efforts might succeed in the future. Pioneering the use of Web-based methods to understand how changes in people's social networks alter their behaviors, Centola illustrates the ways in which these insights can be applied to solve countless problems of organizational change, cultural evolution, and social innovation. His findings offer important lessons for public health workers, entrepreneurs, and activists looking to harness networks for social change.
Practical and informative, How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for anyone interested in how the theory of social networks can transform our world.
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"Overall, How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for researchers who are interested in social networks, social change, communication and technology, and computational social science. The lessons drawn from the book can also help health workers, movement activists, managers, user experiences designers to improve the success of diffusion and induce behavior change within a community."---Yu Xu, Information, Communication & Society
Report
"Well-organized and well-written, How Behavior Spreads shows that complex and simple contagion processes are different, and that these differences are important for understanding a wide class of diffusion outcomes. This is a fine book."--Peter Bearman, Columbia University
