Damon Centola

For readers of Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Thaler, and Cass Sunstein, a bold and paradigm-busting new theory about the complex way ideas and behaviors spread, and how to efficiently effect the change you want to see in the world. 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 only problem is that the world they describe is a world where information spreads, but beliefs and behaviors stay the same. It is a world of simple contagions, which spread quickly to everyone, but do not have any lasting impact on what we think or how we live. When it comes to transforming behaviors and beliefs, the dynamics of change 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 business, sports, health, lifestyle, and politics, Change presents a groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting new science for understanding what drives change, and how we can change the world around us.

The Surprising Science of How New Ideas, Behaviors, and Innovations Take Off and Take Hold

Change

Travis Well

Paraqoting: Centola says there are three basic strategies for effecting broad social change: the shotgun, the silver bullet, and the snowball. The shotgun can miss and fizzle. The silver bullet (influencers leveraging their reach) can backfire. The snowball is to have a relatively close-knit social group go in together, reinforce each others' influence, and then show and tell the broader network.

In short time-bounded data science competitions conducted by Centola and a graduate student, Devon, with funding from NSF. Track 13, 83% through the audio book.

Discovery of "pretty good" solutions can "take [researchers] off the track of discovering something truly innovative that no one else was anticipating. Networks less efficient for information [spreading] were more efficient for exploration."

Our findings showed that the cause of inter-group enmity is not the interactions themselves, but how those interactions are framed. [… Ubiquitous in-group loyalty imagery on social media] implicitly define the boundaries of social influence, [closing people's minds to potential change.]

"Most of us have been tought to think of bias as a feature of individual people's beliefs (some people are biased, and others are not) but the most consequential forms of bias are not in people's heads, but rather in their social networks.

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