Episode 73: Damon Centola
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Changes & Contagions: Spreading New Ideas and Behaviors to Make Great Things Happen
New social movements, beliefs, behaviors, and technologies often struggle to gain traction. Some diseases, such as Covid-19, spread quickly and created a world-changing pandemic. Could the idea of viral diseases be applied in spreading innovations and beneficial behaviors? Damon Centola talks about his best-selling books How Behavior Spreads and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen.
In this episode, he shares the findings of over a decade's worth of original research on social networks and societal behaviors. Damon talks about what drives change— influence, propagation of new ideas, and transmitting beliefs and behaviors from person to person. Listen as he and Greg talk about factors that led to the success of the Black Lives Matter movement, the fall of Google+, and the rise of political polarization.
Episode Quotes:
How influencers may not have much influence when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine
“So, the people who are maybe feeling like, “Oh, it's inconvenient, I get the idea.” But then they see an influencer, and like alright, that gets them over the hump. But the people who are feeling distrustful of the message itself about vaccination, seeing an influencer only makes them suspicious of that influence. It doesn’t change their fundamental receptiveness.”
Why should influencers be cautious about sharing messages?
“An influencer can't just do whatever they want. They have to be sensitive to the audience they're speaking to. And this is where the bias in a community plays such an important role. The emphasis on influencers is misguided because it overlooks the fact that influencers are really only influential when they're reinforcing our existing biases, which is another way of saying they're spreading simple contagions.”
How did World War one recruitment initiatives succeed in leveraging local ties to get more people to join the effort?
“By mobilizing campaigns that basically said, “You can fight with your buddies, the people that you know in your hometown”. Then hometowns actually got behind the war effort, and people mobilized together and generated the largest volunteer army that Britain had seen to date.”
Time Code Guide:
00:01:57: Can analogies between the diffusion of diseases and the diffusion of ideas, beliefs and behaviors complicate its social application?
00:06:16: Social approval for new behavior based on social contagions
00:08:42: How do ideas spread like a virus throughout sociology and economy
00:13:34: How social movements spread
00:16:36: Clubhouse signup and membership as an example of network contagion dynamic
00:29:57: Social proof is not about the numbers, it's about looking at people who already subscribe to the new ideas being shared
00:33:11: How do you apply social network changes when breaking down silos within businesses and organizations?
00:39:21: Health Buddy experiments architecting networks and intervening based on what was created
00:40:16: Infodemic and behavioral economics
00:44:53: Contagion dynamic that shifts the entire population
00:51:14: The science of architecting social capital that can be used to advance positive goals
Show Links:
Guest's Profile:
Damon Centola’s Bio from His Official Website
Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania
Damon Centola’s Bio on Coursera
His Work: