New ideas, technologies and organisational initiatives often struggle to succeed, yet many diseases disperse rapidly. Can viral diffusion be a model to improve spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? Prof. Centola will discuss breakthroughs in the science of network diffusion, and how these have improved understanding of how changes in societal behaviour – in voting, health, technology, finance, vaccination, and political mobilisation – occur, and how social networks can influence how they propagate. Many accepted ideas about viral spreading – in which “influencers” are king and “sticky” ideas “go viral” – have been responsible for causing generations of societal and organisational change efforts to fail. Prof. Centola presents new and effective ways to enable social change efforts to trigger tipping points that create widespread acceptance for new practices and norms.
About the speaker
Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Before coming to Penn, Damon was a Professor of System Dynamics at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management and a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University.
He is a leading expert on social networks and behavior change. Damon’s work has received numerous awards including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Sociological Methodology; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent based modeling environment, and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Facebook, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN, among other outlets.
His speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cigna, Google, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Heart Association, General Motors, the National Academies, the U.S. Army and the NBA. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press, and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton, 2018), and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little Brown, 2021).
