The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment

Join the Club An important question for policy-makers is how to communicate information (for example, about public health interventions) and promote behavior change most effectively across a population. The structure of a social network can dramatically affect the diffusion of behavior through a population. Centola (p. 1194 ) examined whether the number of individuals choosing to register for a health forum could be influenced by an artificially constructed network of neighbors that were signed up for the forum. The behavior spread more readily on clustered networks than on random, poorly clustered ones. Certain types of behavior within human systems are thus more likely to spread if people are exposed to many other people who have already adopted the behavior (for example, in the circumstances where your friends know each other, as well as yourself).