Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: succeeded, women tended to adopt the same contraceptive methods as their contacts.This produced uniformity on contraceptive methods used within villages; however, there was a surprising amount of variation in the methods adopted across villages.Some were "IUD" villages, whereas others were "pill" villages, and still others were "vasectomy" villages.Interestingly, the particular method of contraception was not the determining factor for successful diffusion; rather, it was the network of social influence.3 In the most successful villages, closely knit groups were linked together by overlapping social ties, which fostered the spread of contraceptive use throughout the community.The more studies that followed, the more findings supported the same basic conclusionthat social networks are the primary pathways for the spread of new social norms.4 An unexpected puzzle arose, however, from the fact the network pathways that were most successful for spreading behavior change were not the same networks that would be predicted by the theory of viral diffusion.While the viral model suggests that radiating networks of weak ties would lead to successful dissemination, it was instead overlapping patterns of spatial interaction that were the key to widespread adoption.In the decades since, scores of similar findings have surfaced in every field of diffusion research, from the spread of digital technologies to the mobilization of social movements.A growing catalog of studies has found that closely knit, densely overlapping networks are associated with the successful spread of innovative behaviors.Today, the notion of virality animates the research agendas of hundreds of thousands of scientists worldwide, ranging from computer scientists and physicists, to sociologists and marketing scholars.Across many of these areas, lessons from the field of infectious-disease epidemiology provide a general orientation for studying behavioral contagions.The guiding assumption is that behaviors spread like viruses.The author of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell crystallized this idea: "I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.This isn't just a metaphor, in other words.I'm talking about a very literal analogy. . . .Ideas can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is." 5 This book offers a different perspective on diffusion.I show why the disease theory of diffusion does not work for understanding the spread of most behaviors and what this tells us about the kinds of social networks that are best suited for spreading innovations.This journey to
Author: Damon Centola
Language: English
Subfield: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2808823985