[gov3009-l] Damon Centola on 'Diffusion in Social Networks'

Dear Applied Statistics Community, The applied statistics workshop is back for another exciting installment. This week we have Damon Centola, RWJ Scholar, Harvard University to present on 'Diffusion in Social Networks: New Theory and Experiments' . Damon provided the following abstract for his talk: The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long – they connect socially distant locations. Research on "small worlds" shows that these long ties can dramatically reduce the "degrees of separation" of a social network, thereby allowing ideas and behaviors to rapidly diffuse. However, I show that the opposite can also be true. Increasing the frequency of long ties in a clustered social network can also inhibit the diffusion of collective behavior across a population. For health related behaviors that require strong social reinforcement, such as dieting, exercising, smoking, or even condom use, successful diffusion may depend primarily on the width of bridges between otherwise distant locations, not just their length. I present formal and computational results that demonstrate these findings, and then propose an experimental design for empirically testing the effects of social network topology on the diffusion of health behavior. The workshop is held on Wednesday at 12 noon in room N 354, CGIS Knafel (1737 Cambridge St). And a light lunch will be served. If you have any questions or concerns please don't hesistate to contact me, Best, Justin Grimmer