How Do 'Things' Spread in Society?

Social networks play a fundamental role in the propagation of ideas, opinions, innovations, recommendations and media. The 'spread' of a phenomena or behavior throguh a social network is called Diffusion. The ability of an individual to to manipulate the propagation process, by influencing other people, is called Social Influence.

Models of social diffusion and influence are important across many different fields-- e.g. the adoption of opinions and news (political science), the diffusion of innovations (management science), the spread of obesity and smoking behaviors (public healthcare), transmissive diseases (epidemiology), the viral spread of music (social media). However, social diffusion is usually modeled using simple stochastic models, not based on real world face-to-face interaction data.

Our approach is to use mobile phones as social sensors to capture the face to face interactions and phone communication for a close-knit community (student dormitory). We combine this data with information about the adoption of political opinions, common ailments, social behaviors and viral music, to build a predictive model that explains how these behaviors diffuse in our society.

For more information, please follow the links on the left sidebar. This project is part of the Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab