Damon Centola is the Assistant Professor of Behavioral and
Policy Sciences at MIT where his work focuses on the relation between social networks
and social contagions. Most of his work since 2009 focuses on how social
networks affect health related preferences and can guide policies that want to spread
a certain type of positive behavior within a community.
To study how people a desired behavior Centola ran an
experiment to see how responsive people were to an online fitness program, depending
on the network that the program represented. We may have observed that people
with certain negative habits tend to interact primarily with one another,
limiting their interaction with others who may have better habits. This makes
it difficult to enforce positive changes. This concept is applicable to the
health related behaviors as well. People who are less healthy tend to display
this ‘homophily’ or similarity among their contacts. Could a network of
clustered people then create a faster spreading positive behavioral change? Centola
recreated this situation on an online community where he paired participants as
“buddies” based on their interests and personal characteristics like age, BMI
etc. He then placed participants in two networks: one with long ties and those
with just large clusters of people. He found participants in clusters responded
much more positively than participants with longer ties. Moreover, social reinforcement
was observed when having more health buddies participate in a similar program
made a participant return frequently to the program. Therefore closely
clustered groups can be faster at spreading a certain behavior, especially in
the context of disease prevention. Studies on behavioral implications of social
networks can better guide our policies to achieve maximum impact in a short
time. “Neighborhood effects” cause better spillovers for desirable health
behaviors. The picture below depicts the diffusion of habits in a clustered group (right) versus a group with long ties (left). Clustered group shows faster diffusion (represented by blue dots)
Watch this video to see how the public-health networks can
be better targeted for spreading preventative habits!
Some of Damon Centola’s popular studies are Social Media and the Science of Health Behavior and A
Simple Model of Stability in Critical Mass Dynamics.
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