How Behavior Spreads : : The Science of Complex Contagions / / Damon Centola.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Centola, Damon,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2018]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Analytical Sociology Series ; 3
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.) :; 53 b/w illus.

A new, counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behaviorNew 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Part I. Theory -- Chapter 2. Understanding Diffusion -- Chapter 3. The Theory of Complex Contagions -- Chapter 4. A Social Experiment on the Internet -- Part II. Applications -- Introduction to Part II -- Chapter 5. Complex Contagions in Other Contexts -- Chapter 6. Diffusing Innovations That Face Opposition -- Chapter 7. Diffusing Change in Organizations -- Part III. Social Design -- Introduction to Part III -- Chapter 8. Designing Social Networks for Diffusion -- Chapter 9. Creating Social Contexts for Behavior Change -- Part IV. Conclusions -- Chapter 10. Conclusion -- Epilogue. Experimental Sociology -- Appendix A. The Ethics of Social Design -- Appendix B. Methods of Computational Social Science -- Appendix C. Technical Appendix for Models -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Index