“There has been a lot of theory about the difference between information and behavior spreading,” said economic sociologist Damon Centola of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the study published September 3 in Science. “We’ve assumed that they are the same, but you can imagine that behavior is not really like that, that you need to be convinced.”

The research has important implications for people designing online communities intended to change or maintain a behavior, like weight watchers or online health communities, Centola said.

To do the experiment, he created an internet-based health community and invited people already participating in other online health forums to join. Over 1,500 people signed up to participate, and they were placed anonymously in one of two different kinds of networks: a random network with many distant ties (above left), or a clustered network with many overlapping connections (above right).

Users in both networks had the same number of assigned ‘health buddies.’ They couldn’t contact their buddies directly, but they could see how their buddies rated content on the site, and could receive emails informing them of their buddies activities. Centola said he deliberately didn’t pay the volunteers, so they would participate out of legitimate interest in the site’s content.

In six different trials over a period a few weeks, Centola seeded the site with information about an online health forum and tracked people as they signed up and participated.

In the clustered network, 54 percent of the people signed up for the forum, compared to 38 percent in the random network, and almost four times as fast. Not surprisingly, Centola also found the more friends people had that also signed up, the more likely they were to return to the forum to participate.

“I feel that the greatest contribution of this study has to do with the very unusual social experiment that it relies on,” said economist Tomas Barrios of Stanford University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Usually experimental data for social experiments comes form hard to swallow lab settings, or if not, very low tension, low risk social situations that can be ethically intervened by experimenters.”

Barrios also said many researchers have made mathematical models to understand the spread of behavior, but that the models have have little application in predicting what will actually happen in the real world.

These studies cannot be done yet using data from Facebook or Twitter Centola says, because the network is constantly changing and too gigantic to download all at once.

Image: Damon Centola

See Also:

• Gene Makes Some Drink More When Other Boozers Are Around
• Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System
• Circuit-Tweaking Reverse Engineers a Gene Network
• Network Theory Could Regulate Human Reproduction
• Magnetic Nanoparticles Can Remotely Control Worms
• Kindness Breeds More Kindness, Study Shows

Authors: Jess McNally

to know more click here