Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence
Busting the myth of “groupthink,” a powerful look at how our ability to influence one another can accelerate individual and collective intelligence.
In Goodthink, Damon Centola shows how to build teams, design online platforms, and create office spaces that sharpen our thinking individually and align our intelligence collectively. The secret, it turns out, is in the shape of our networks.
Race & Gender Bias in Medicine
Race and gender bias in clinical practice is a persistent cause of healthcare disparities. This study investigates the potential of a peer network approach to reduce bias in medical treatment decisions within an experimental setting.
Physician Reasoning
Errors in clinical decision-making are disturbingly common. In this study, we show that structured information–sharing networks among clinicians significantly reduce diagnostic errors, and improve treatment recommendations.
Correcting Anchoring Bias
We investigate how social learning in structured information-sharing networks affects anchoring bias. Using a large-scale experiment, we show that networked groups can reduce the influence of harmful anchors while increasing the influence of helpful ones, leading to significant improvements in individual and collective accuracy through the dynamics of collective intelligence.
Dynamics of Morality & Emotion
We examine the network dynamics that lead populations of individuals who initially disagree about which behaviors are virtuous to arrive at consistent, replicable consensus in their beliefs about virtuous behavior.
Op-Eds and Features
Check out op-eds by NDG members and current affairs features published in major media outlets.
Vaccine Hesitancy
This study addresses a 21st century problem that arises from the interaction between the history of institutional discrimination and racism in health, and the network dynamics of how a community’s structure affects the flow of novel health information about vaccination.
Content Moderation
The online proliferation of false, hateful, and illegal content has required social media organizations to monitor and remove content that violates their community standards – a practice known as content moderation.
Influencers & Optimal Seeding
Despite decades of work on the network structures underlying social influence, standard measures of node centrality frequently misidentify the most influential nodes in a network.
Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
A paradigm-busting new theory about the complex way innovative ideas, movements, and behaviors spread from the edges of society to impact everyone, and how to use these ideas to effect the change you want to see in the world.
How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions
In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior–in voting, health, technology, and finance—occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate.
The Wisdom of Partisan Crowds
To test whether the wisdom of crowds is robust to partisan bias, we conducted two web-based experiments in which individuals answered factual questions known to elicit partisan bias before and after observing the estimates of peers in a politically homogeneous social network.
Network Dynamics of Category Emergence
In this study, we use formal models and online experiments to see how categories emerge in social networks. Specifically, we develop novel theories and analyses to explain how categories emerge in social networks of various sizes and topologies.
Online Course
This course condenses the last decade of cutting-edge research on these topics into six modules. Each module provides an in-depth look at a particular research puzzle -with a focus on agent-based models and network theories of social change.
Networked Smoking Cessation
In an online experiment, we use engineered social networks to harness peer influence among smokers and nonsmokers in such a way that counteracts and eliminates biased interpretations of warning labels.
Communicating Climate Change
In this study, we provide a method for facilitating cross-party communication that eliminates biased interpretations of climate data among conservatives, while also improving the interpretations of liberals.
Support or Competition?
In a randomized controlled trial, we evaluate the effects of social support and social comparison independently, and in combination, to determine how social motivations for behavior change directly impact people’s exercise activity.
Creating Critical Mass
The “tipping point” is a common explanation for sudden shifts in collective behavior, but the limitations of historical evidence and conflicting theoretical models present a challenge to understanding how a small but committed group can change the behavior of an entire population.
Cervical Cancer Prevention with Twitter
This project seeks to understand the discussion of HPV vaccination and cervical cancer on social media. Cervical cancer causes 4,220 annual deaths. 17% women do not receive appropriate Pap smear screening.
What’s new?
Check here for the latest papers, publications and information about the Network Dynamics Group.
The Emperor’s Dilemma
The authors demonstrate the uses of agent-based computational models in an application to a social enigma they call the “emperor’s dilemma,” based on the Hans Christian Andersen fable.
Cultural Drift
Studies of cultural differentiation have shown that social mechanisms that normally lead to cultural convergence—homophily and influence—can also explain how distinct cultural groups can form.
Scale Free Failure
A class of inhomogenously wired networks called “scale-free” networks have been shown to be more robust against failure than more homogenously connected exponential networks.
Network Evolution
How do online health networks evolve? A growing number of online health communities offer individuals the opportunity to receive information, advice, and support from their peers.
Diffusing Health Innovations
To understand how changes in people’s social “neighborhoods” affect the spread of health innovations, we developed an in vivo study that manipulated the level of “homophily”—similarity of social contacts—among the participants in an online fitness program.
Homophily, networks, and critical mass
Formal theories of collective action face the problem that in large groups a single actor makes such a small impact on the collective good that cooperation is irrational.
A simple model of stability in critical mass dynamics
In collective behaviors with strongly self-reinforcing dynamics, incentives to participate increase with the number of participants, such that incentives are highest when the full population has adopted the behavior.
Emergence of Spontaneous Social Norms
How do norms emerge? In small groups, people have complete knowledge of one another’s behaviors, making it relatively easy to create shared expectations.
Networked Innovation
Do efficient communication networks increase collective intelligence? Scientists, engineers and strategists all work within highly connected environments where each person’s solutions are used to inspire and inform the work of others.