How Behavior Spreads

How Behavior Spreads PDF Author: Damon Centola
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202427
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
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 improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? How Behavior Spreads 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. Damon Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions that accelerate the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors. How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for anyone interested in how the theory of social networks can transform our world.

How Behavior Spreads

How Behavior Spreads PDF Author: Damon Centola
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202427
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book

Book Description
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 improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? How Behavior Spreads 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. Damon Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions that accelerate the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors. How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for anyone interested in how the theory of social networks can transform our world.

How Behavior Spreads

How Behavior Spreads PDF Author: Damon Centola
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400890098
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
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.

Change

Change PDF Author: Damon Centola
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316457345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
How to create the change you want to see in the world using the paradigm-busting ideas in this "utterly fascinating" (Adam Grant) big-idea book.​ Most of what we know about how ideas spread comes from bestselling authors who give us a compelling picture of a world, in which "influencers" are king, "sticky" ideas "go viral," and good behavior is "nudged" forward. The problem is that the world they describe is a world where information spreads, but beliefs and behaviors stay the same. When it comes to lasting change in what we think or the way we live, the dynamics are different: beliefs and behaviors are not transmitted from person to person in the simple way that a virus is. The real story of social change is more complex. When we are exposed to a new idea, our social networks guide our responses in striking and surprising ways. Drawing on deep-yet-accessible research and fascinating examples from the spread of coronavirus to the success of the Black Lives Matter movement, the failure of Google+, and the rise of political polarization, Change presents groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting new science for understanding what drives change, and how we can change the world around us.

The Rules of Contagion

The Rules of Contagion PDF Author: Adam Kucharski
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782834303
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
An Observer Book of the Year A Times Science Book of the Year A New Statesman Book of the Year A Financial Times Science Book of the Year 'Astonishingly bold' Daily Mail 'It is hard to imagine a more timely book ... much of the modern world will make more sense having read it.' The Times We live in a world that's more interconnected than ever before. Our lives are shaped by outbreaks - of disease, of misinformation, even of violence - that appear, spread and fade away with bewildering speed. To understand them, we need to learn the hidden laws that govern them. From 'superspreaders' who might spark a pandemic or bring down a financial system to the social dynamics that make loneliness catch on, The Rules of Contagion offers compelling insights into human behaviour and explains how we can get better at predicting what happens next. Along the way, Adam Kucharski explores how innovations spread through friendship networks, what links computer viruses with folk stories - and why the most useful predictions aren't necessarily the ones that come true. Now revised and updated with content on Covid-19.

Contagious

Contagious PDF Author: Jonah Berger
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451686587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Creative Homeowner,

Under the Influence

Under the Influence PDF Author: Robert H. Frank
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227101
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a revelatory look at the power and potential of social context. As psychologists have long understood, social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. Less widely noted is that social influence is a two-way street: Our environments are in large part themselves a product of the choices we make. Society embraces regulations that limit physical harm to others, as when smoking restrictions are defended as protecting bystanders from secondhand smoke. But we have been slower to endorse parallel steps that discourage harmful social environments, as when regulators fail to note that the far greater harm caused when someone becomes a smoker is to make others more likely to smoke. In Under the Influence, Robert Frank attributes this regulatory asymmetry to the laudable belief that individuals should accept responsibility for their own behavior. Yet that belief, he argues, is fully compatible with public policies that encourage supportive social environments. Most parents hope, for example, that their children won't grow up to become smokers, bullies, tax cheats, sexual predators, or problem drinkers. But each of these hopes is less likely to be realized whenever such behaviors become more common. Such injuries are hard to measure, Frank acknowledges, but that's no reason for policymakers to ignore them. The good news is that a variety of simple policy measures could foster more supportive social environments without ushering in the dreaded nanny state or demanding painful sacrifices from anyone"--

Complex Spreading Phenomena in Social Systems

Complex Spreading Phenomena in Social Systems PDF Author: Sune Lehmann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319773321
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This text is about spreading of information and influence in complex networks. Although previously considered similar and modeled in parallel approaches, there is now experimental evidence that epidemic and social spreading work in subtly different ways. While previously explored through modeling, there is currently an explosion of work on revealing the mechanisms underlying complex contagion based on big data and data-driven approaches. This volume consists of four parts. Part 1 is an Introduction, providing an accessible summary of the state of the art. Part 2 provides an overview of the central theoretical developments in the field. Part 3 describes the empirical work on observing spreading processes in real-world networks. Finally, Part 4 goes into detail with recent and exciting new developments: dedicated studies designed to measure specific aspects of the spreading processes, often using randomized control trials to isolate the network effect from confounders, such as homophily. Each contribution is authored by leading experts in the field. This volume, though based on technical selections of the most important results on complex spreading, remains quite accessible to the newly interested. The main benefit to the reader is that the topics are carefully structured to take the novice to the level of expert on the topic of social spreading processes. This book will be of great importance to a wide field: from researchers in physics, computer science, and sociology to professionals in public policy and public health.

Thought Contagion

Thought Contagion PDF Author: Aaron Lynch
Publisher:
ISBN: 0786725648
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s groundbreaking examination of memetics--the new study of how ideas and beliefs spread. What characterizes a meme is its capacity for displacing rival ideas and beliefs in an evolutionary drama that determines and changes the way people think. Exactly how do ideas spread, and what are the factors that make them genuine thought contagions? Why, for instance, do some beliefs spread throughout society, while others dwindle to extinction? What drives those intensely held beliefs that spawn ideological and political debates such as views on abortion and opinions about sex and sexuality?By drawing on examples from everyday life, Lynch develops a conceptual basis for understanding memetics. Memes evolve by natural selection in a process similar to that of Genes in evolutionary biology. What makes an idea a potent meme is how effectively it out-propagates other ideas. In memetic evolution, the "fittest ideas” are not always the truest or the most helpful, but the ones best at self replication.Thus, crash diets spread not because of lasting benefit, but by alternating episodes of dramatic weight loss and slow regain. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask, "How did you do it?” thereby manipulating them to experiment with the diet and in turn, spread it again. The faster the pounds return, the more often these people enter that disseminating phase, all of which favors outbreaks of the most pathogenic diets. Like a software virus traveling on the Internet or a flu strain passing through a city, thought contagions proliferate by programming for their own propagation. Lynch argues that certain beliefs spread like viruses and evolve like microbes, as mutant strains vie for more adherents and more hosts. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. Readers of this intriguing theory will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, politics, religion, health, and war have succeeded by their "fitness” as thought contagions.

Contagion of Violence

Contagion of Violence PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309263646
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
The past 25 years have seen a major paradigm shift in the field of violence prevention, from the assumption that violence is inevitable to the recognition that violence is preventable. Part of this shift has occurred in thinking about why violence occurs, and where intervention points might lie. In exploring the occurrence of violence, researchers have recognized the tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one type to another. Furthermore, violent acts are often preceded or followed by other violent acts. In the field of public health, such a process has also been seen in the infectious disease model, in which an agent or vector initiates a specific biological pathway leading to symptoms of disease and infectivity. The agent transmits from individual to individual, and levels of the disease in the population above the baseline constitute an epidemic. Although violence does not have a readily observable biological agent as an initiator, it can follow similar epidemiological pathways. On April 30-May 1, 2012, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Global Violence Prevention convened a workshop to explore the contagious nature of violence. Part of the Forum's mandate is to engage in multisectoral, multidirectional dialogue that explores crosscutting, evidence-based approaches to violence prevention, and the Forum has convened four workshops to this point exploring various elements of violence prevention. The workshops are designed to examine such approaches from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels of society. In particular, the workshop on the contagion of violence focused on exploring the epidemiology of the contagion, describing possible processes and mechanisms by which violence is transmitted, examining how contextual factors mitigate or exacerbate the issue. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary covers the major topics that arose during the 2-day workshop. It is organized by important elements of the infectious disease model so as to present the contagion of violence in a larger context and in a more compelling and comprehensive way.

Middle Leadership Mastery

Middle Leadership Mastery PDF Author: Adam Robbins
Publisher: Crown House Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1785835629
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
To make the best decisions possible, middle leaders need to have a nuanced understanding of the consequences of their actions. In this pragmatic book, Adam Robbins aims to boost their role-specific expertise to help them achieve that goal - and offers them a preferable alternative to learning from their mistakes. Instead of relying on generic leadership theories, Middle Leadership Mastery collates perspectives from psychology and cognitive science to share evidence-informed guidance on a wide range of topics - from supporting staff and students in crisis and managing wellbeing, to quality-assuring teaching and curriculum design. Adam Robbins draws on his sixteen years' experience of teaching in a deprived area to illustrate his points with stories and anecdotes from the front line, demonstrating how middle leaders can better understand their context and deliver the best outcomes from a variety of starting points.