social contagion

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

by Duncan J. Watts  · 1 Feb 2003  · 379pp  · 113,656 words

computer viruses and can be read with limited references to the previous chapters. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with the related but distinct subject of social contagion, and what it tells us about cultural fads, political upheavals, and financial bubbles. Chapter 9 discusses organizational robustness and its lessons for modern business firms

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the next chapter, in fact, we will see that other distinctions must be made if we are to understand the difference between biological contagion and social contagion problems like the diffusion of a technological innovation, distinctions that again carry important implications for the real-world phenomena we would like to understand. Percolation

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to an epidemic of disease. It just wasn’t the same kind of contagion. This point is particularly important because typically when we talk about social contagion problems, we use the language of disease. Thus, we speak of ideas as infectious, crime waves as epidemics, and market safeguards as building immunity against

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amount. Figure 8.1. Probability of infection in the standard disease-spreading model as a function of the number of an individual’s infected neighbors. Social contagion, by contrast, is a highly contingent process, the impact of a particular person’s opinion depending, possibly dramatically, on the other opinions solicited. A negative

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us about collective decision making should apply regardless of many of the details. CAPTURING DIFFERENCES ONCE AGAIN, HOWEVER, SOME DETAILS DO MATTER. MOST IMPORTANT, in social contagion problems of all varieties, we need to account for the basic observation that people are different. Some people, for whatever reason, are more altruistic than

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? These were all good questions, but as I dug deeper into the problem, it became obvious that the answers weren’t going to come easily. Social contagion, it turns out, is even more counterintuitive than biological contagion, because in threshold models, the impact of one person’s action on another’s depends

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already pointed out, we don’t have to worry about this effect because every contagion event can be considered independently of any other. But in social contagion, it makes all the difference in the world. An isolated group of people—a religious cult like the Branch Davidians, for example—can maintain completely

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that it failed. Again, the success of an innovation appears to require a trade-off between local reinforcement and global connectivity. And this requirement renders social contagion significantly harder to understand than its biological counterpart, where connectivity is all that matters. After a good deal of unsuccessful casting around, I eventually conceded

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occupies a finite fraction of the network no matter how large the network is. By analogy, when a percolating cluster arises in the context of social contagion, we say the system is susceptible to a global cascade. Cascades of smaller sizes happen all the time—every shock, in fact, triggers a cascade

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the giant component of a random graph that we encountered originally in chapter 2 and then again in chapter 6. Near the lower boundary, therefore, social contagion is largely equivalent to biological contagion, because it undergoes the same phase transition that epidemics of disease do. So under some conditions the conflation of

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, is the principal obstacle to a successful cascade—it is also true that in poorly connected networks, highly connected individuals are disproportionately effective in propagating social contagion. This second observation reflects standard diffusion-of-innovations thinking, according to which opinion leaders and centrally situated actors are considered the most effective promoters of

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technology. For example, in his recent book, The Tipping Point, the writer and journalist Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes the role that highly connected individuals play in social contagion, where his use of the term tipping point corresponds roughly to the notion of a global cascade. Although Gladwell develops his ideas about the diffusion

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of ideas from the premise that social contagion operates no differently from disease contagion, his observations are in general agreement with those of the threshold model, provided that the network of decision makers

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over you. So when everyone is paying attention to many others, no single innovator, acting alone, can activate any one of them. This feature of social contagion is what sets it apart from biological contagion, where a susceptible individual’s contact with a single infective has the same effect, regardless of how

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many other contacts the susceptible has had. In social contagion, remember, it is the relative number of “infected” versus “uninfected”—active versus inactive—neighbors that matters. So although highly connected networks might seem, on the

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, each node constraining the influence of any other and being constrained itself. So our anecdotal observation from earlier can now be made more precise: in social contagion, a system will only experience global cascades if it strikes a trade-off, specified by the cascade window of Figure 8.5, between local stability

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and global connectivity. CROSSING THE CHASM BUT SOCIAL CONTAGION HAS ANOTHER SURPRISE IN STORE. RIGHT at the upper boundary of the cascade window, the density of vulnerable nodes is just enough for the network

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can also shed light on the question of network robustness that we encountered in chapter 6. And in this context, we need not be discussing social contagion at all. Sometimes, systems that are characterized by many interdependent parts interacting in complicated ways, such as power grids and large organizations, can exhibit sudden

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cascades on random networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 5766–5771 (2002). Phase Transitions and Cascades Malcolm Gladwell’s engaging discussion of social contagion is Gladwell, M. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, New York, 2000). Crossing the Chasm Geoffrey Moore’s

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It

by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan  · 15 Mar 2014  · 414pp  · 101,285 words

also shaped the risk from contagious diseases; in addition to the physical channels of transmission, we need to be aware of the risks related to “‘social’ contagion.”17 An additional challenge is managing the dissemination of information about sensitive research. An example has been the debate surrounding the decision by the U

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World

by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg  · 15 Nov 2010  · 1,535pp  · 337,071 words

product or innovation can cascade through the network structure. Here, e-mail recommendations for a Japanese graphic novel spread in a kind of informational or social contagion. (Image from Leskovec et al. [267].) in which e-mail recommendations for a particular Japanese graphic novel spread outward from four initial purchasers. By reasoning

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have a high amount of linkage among themselves, and hence are resistant to outside influences. Cascading behavior in a network is sometimes referred to as “social contagion,” because it spreads from one person to another in the style of a biological epidemic. Figure 1.12 reinforces this analogy; it shows the beginning

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forms a visual counterpart to the social cascade in Figure 1.11. There are fundamental differences in the underlying mechanisms between social and biological contagion — social contagion tends to involve decision-making on the part of the affected individuals, whereas biological contagion is based on the chance of catching a disease-causing

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epidemic disease (such as the tuberculosis outbreak shown here) is another form of cascading behavior in a network. The similarities and contrasts between biological and social contagion lead to interesting research questions. (Image from Andre et al. [17].) process that takes place on networks. A different process that we also consider is

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connect people, and in this respect, they exhibit very similar structural mechansisms — to the extent that the spread of ideas is often referred to as “social contagion” [84]. Having considered the diffusion of ideas, innovations, and new behaviors in Chapter 19, why then are we revisiting this topic afresh in the context

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of diseases? In the context of our discussions here about networks, the biggest difference between biological and social contagion lies in the process by which one person “infects” another. With social contagion, people are making decisions to adopt a new idea or innovation, and our models in Chapter 19 were focused

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have no useful simple models. This, then, will be the concrete difference in our discussion of biological as opposed to 21.2. BRANCHING PROCESSES 657 social contagion — not so much the new context as the new classes of models, based on random processes in networks, that will be employed. In the next

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propagation takes place through genealogical networks. Before moving on to this, it is worth noting that randomized models can also sometimes be useful in studying social contagion, particularly in cases where the underlying decision processes of the individuals are hard to model and hence more usefully abstracted as random. Often the two

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. Game theory and run/pass balance, 13 June 2008. http://www.advancednflstats.com/2008/06/game-theory-and-runpass-balance.html. [84] Ronald S. Burt. Social contagion and innovation: Cohesion versus structural equivalence. American Journal of Sociology, 92(6):1287–1335, May 1987. [85] Ronald S. Burt. Structural Holes: The Social Structure

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff  · 15 Jan 2019  · 918pp  · 257,605 words

,000 additional voters to the polls in the 2010 midterm elections, as well as another 280,000 who cast votes as a result of a “social contagion” effect, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. In their concluding remarks, the researchers asserted that “we show the importance of social influence for

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter

by Susan Pinker  · 30 Sep 2013  · 404pp  · 124,705 words

Disease 2. It Takes a Village to Raise a Centenarian Longevity as a Team Sport 3. A Thousand Invisible Threads Face-to-Face Contact and Social Contagion 4. Who’s Coming to Dinner Food, Drink, and Social Bonds 5. Baby Chemistry How Social Contact Transforms Infants’ Brains 6. Digital Natives Electronic Devices

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difference. But what if you don’t happen to live in an isolated mountaintop village? 3 A Thousand Invisible Threads Face-to-Face Contact and Social Contagion Out of seven billion people in the world, six billion think religion helps them live a long, meaningful life—and science tells us they’re

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,” which is just a fancy way of saying that the fun and benefit of doing things together outweighs doing them alone. Could something other than social contagion be at the root of the sibling baby boomlet that follows a sister’s first child? Siblings who are two years apart in age might

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concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.”31 Being There As we’ve seen, the process of social contagion begins with mimicry: sensing what other people are doing in real time and unconsciously doing it too. Like the chimps who “aped” their tree-signaling

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. And the closer your relationship to someone, the more infectious his happiness—and also his frustration and despair. Which is to say that not all social contagion is for the good. Nowhere is this more evident than when neurological symptoms spread from person to person within tightly knit social groups. When several

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because we gravitate toward people who have the same cravings. Catching obesity from friends of friends could be more a matter of shared characteristics than social contagion, though friends who are in close proximity would certainly copy and influence each other too, amplifying the effect. The researchers knew, of course, that social

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thousands of overlapping earthquakes that shake our tectonic plates every year.4 Clearly there was more than one thing going on at once. Aside from social contagion and homophily, there could be other causes of weight gain among friends, such as a new McDonald’s in the neighborhood (or in my case

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would be only 13 percent more likely to put on weight if Susan did. Christakis and Fowler attribute the difference between these two numbers to social contagion. This conclusion is controversial, and statisticians and health economists have since disputed whether the difference between these numbers is meaningful.5 Still, Christakis and Fowler

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or mirroring their friends. If it’s the latter, they’re simply playing bit parts in the “human superorganism,” as Fowler and Christakis call it. Social contagion spurs boozing and smoking much the way it transmits obesity. If we are wired to communicate our feelings and proclivities through language and nonverbal signals

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whose feet were bound. At a time when they didn’t have much political muscle, women helped promote huge changes, often behind the scenes, through social contagion and peer pressure. Similar shifts occurred when women led the temperance movement. And they continue to happen. Whether working to dramatically reduce infant mortality in

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky  · 1 May 2017  · 1,261pp  · 294,715 words

, among marmosets aggression in a group becomes more likely if aggressive vocalizations are heard from the neighboring group. Other primates are even subject to the social contagion of yawning.*52 My favorite example of nonhuman conformity is so familiar that it could come right out of high school. A male grouse courts

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. Grosenick et al., “Fish Can Infer Social Rank by Observation Alone,” Nat 445 (2007): 429. 52. C. Watson and C. Caldwell, “Neighbor Effects in Marmosets: Social Contagion of Agonism and Affiliation in Captive Callithrix jacchus,” Am J Primat 72 (2010): 549; K. Baker and F. Aureli, “The Neighbor Effect: Other Groups Influence

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier  · 28 Jun 2020  · 345pp  · 87,534 words

lure troubled young girls with no history of gender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion, society—perhaps—can arrest it. No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower. CHAPTER ONE THE GIRLS If you

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unconsciously striving for recognition and legitimization of internal distress, his or her subconscious will be drawn toward those symptoms that will achieve those ends.”¹⁵ Many social contagions are spread this way. Hong Kong, for instance, had never experienced an epidemic of what Westerners call “anorexia”—girls, captivated by a belief that they

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never going to be able to help those who actually need it if we’re fast-tracking transition for troubled girls caught up in a social contagion. “I had to go through many hoops to be able to be here today. I had to go to mental health care. I had to

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name.’ I think you have to find your own limits though.” To those who simply want to inoculate their own daughters from the fast-spreading social contagion of gender ideology, I can offer a bit more. School districts, teachers, and even other parents are right now sowing gender confusion. Confronting it requires

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trans has become politically unwise and socially verboten—hateful by definition—an alleged assault on all transgender people, genuine and ersatz. But of course, the social contagion captivating teens has nothing to do with those who have suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and, in adulthood, fashioned for themselves a transgender life. The

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. K. Lewis & Col, Ltd., 1935), 18–19. 8 . Penrose, On the Objective Study of Crowd Behavior, 19. 9 . Shannon Keating, “Gender Dysphoria Isn’t a ‘Social Contagion,’ According to a New Study,” BuzzFeed, April 22, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/shannonkeating/rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-flawed-methods-transgender ; See also: Arjee

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, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 46. 5 . See, e.g., Kravetz, Strange Contagion, 55–81. 6 . See, e.g., S. Jarvi et al., “The Impact of Social Contagion on Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: A Review of the Literature,” Archives of Suicide Research 17, no. 1 (2013): 1–19, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih

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, 212–13 Shoah Foundation,113 Shorter, Edward,136 Singh, Devita,124 smartphones,4 , 19 , 212 Smith College,150 social anxiety,34 , 42 , 45 , 94–95 social contagion,xxiv , 136 , 207 , 212 , 219 social media,4–6 , 23 , 25–26 , 34 , 36 , 38–39 , 42 , 44 , 52 , 80 , 150 , 190 , 196–97 , 203

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

by Nicholas A. Christakis  · 27 Oct 2020  · 475pp  · 127,389 words

long ago. As noted above, in the case of the possible parallel epidemics of a virus and of fear, there can be both biological and social contagions. People generally copy the visible behaviors of those around them, so there can be tipping points in both directions. As more and more people start

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, “Targeted Quarantines Top U.S. Adults’ Conditions for Normalcy,” Gallup, May 11, 2020, accessed May 24, 2020. 17 F. Fu et al., “Dueling Biological and Social Contagions,” Scientific Reports 2017; 7: 43634. 18 J.M. Epstein et al., “Couple Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease: Mathematical and Computational Explorations,” PLOS ONE 2008

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It

by Kelly McGonigal  · 1 Dec 2011  · 354pp  · 91,875 words

. H. Fowler. “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years.” New England Journal of Medicine 357 (2007): 370–79. Page 186—Social contagion studies: Fowler, J. H., and N. A. Christakis. “Estimating Peer Effects on Health in Social Networks: A Response to Cohen-Cole and Fletcher; and Trogdon

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work

by Vishen Lakhiani  · 14 Sep 2020

.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House Canada, 2014. phenomenon which explains why we embrace religion: “Memetics and Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” Journal of Memetics—Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/marsden_p.html (accessed

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