social contagion

45 results back to index

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

These were all good questions, but as I dug deeper into the problem, it became obvious that the answers weren’t going to come easily. Social contagion, it turns out, is even more counterintuitive than biological contagion, because in threshold models, the impact of one person’s action on another’s depends critically on what other influences the latter has been exposed to. In disease spreading, as already pointed out, we don’t have to worry about this effect because every contagion event can be considered independently of any other. But in social contagion, it makes all the difference in the world. An isolated group of people—a religious cult like the Branch Davidians, for example—can maintain completely implausible beliefs as long as they remain in a context where they can continually reinforce each other and prevent each other from interacting with the outside world.

…

And for the same reason—that network connectivity, rather than the resilience of individual decision makers, is the principal obstacle to a successful cascade—it is also true that in poorly connected networks, highly connected individuals are disproportionately effective in propagating social contagion. This second observation reflects standard diffusion-of-innovations thinking, according to which opinion leaders and centrally situated actors are considered the most effective promoters of a new idea, practice, or technology. For example, in his recent book, The Tipping Point, the writer and journalist Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes the role that highly connected individuals play in social contagion, where his use of the term tipping point corresponds roughly to the notion of a global cascade.

…

As discussed earlier, the more people whose actions or opinions you take into account before making a decision, the less influence any one of them will have over you. So when everyone is paying attention to many others, no single innovator, acting alone, can activate any one of them. This feature of social contagion is what sets it apart from biological contagion, where a susceptible individual’s contact with a single infective has the same effect, regardless of how many other contacts the susceptible has had. In social contagion, remember, it is the relative number of “infected” versus “uninfected”—active versus inactive—neighbors that matters. So although highly connected networks might seem, on the surface, to favor the propagation of all sorts of influence, they do not necessarily support cascades of social influence.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, deplatforming, en.wikipedia.org, false memory syndrome, Frances Oldham Kelsey, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeff Bezos, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, scientific mainstream, Skype, social contagion, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship

It’s closer to a pound of flesh. Some small proportion of the population will always be transgender. But perhaps the current craze will not always lure troubled young girls with no history of gender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion, society—perhaps—can arrest it. No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower. CHAPTER ONE THE GIRLS If you’re an American born before 1990, the words “teenage girls” likely invoke a clutch of young women giggling at the mall. Backs against the pile carpet of a bedroom floor, hair splayed, listening to a song on repeat while conversation runs a similar circuit, chasing some ambiguous interaction with a boy or a girl.

…

This is the idea developed by historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter, and popularized by journalist Ethan Watters: Patients are drawn to “symptom pools”—lists of culturally acceptable ways of manifesting distress that lead to recognized diagnoses.¹³ “ ‘Patients unconsciously endeavor to produce symptoms that will correspond to the medical diagnostics of the time,’ ” Watters credits Shorter with discovering.¹⁴ “Because the patient is unconsciously striving for recognition and legitimization of internal distress, his or her subconscious will be drawn toward those symptoms that will achieve those ends.”¹⁵ Many social contagions are spread this way. Hong Kong, for instance, had never experienced an epidemic of what Westerners call “anorexia”—girls, captivated by a belief that they are fat, engaging in self-starving. Not until 1994, that is, when local media widely publicized the story of a girl whose tragic death was interpreted by news outlets as an example of an unfamiliar Western ailment called anorexia nervosa.

…

That is not to say that Buck Angel doubts the potential benefit of medical transition. On the contrary, he believes it saved his life. But he also believes that we’re never going to be able to help those who actually need it if we’re fast-tracking transition for troubled girls caught up in a social contagion. “I had to go through many hoops to be able to be here today. I had to go to mental health care. I had to get a note. I had to do this whole step-by-step process, which enabled me to have a secure transition.” It isn’t a process he resents. It’s a process that he believes prepared him mentally for the life he now leads.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

The Reverend Henry Melvill, 1856 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Introduction People Who Need People 1. Swimming Through the School of Hard Knocks How Social Bonds Can Rejig the Outcome of Chronic Disease 2. It Takes a Village to Raise a Centenarian Longevity as a Team Sport 3. A Thousand Invisible Threads Face-to-Face Contact and Social Contagion 4. Who’s Coming to Dinner Food, Drink, and Social Bonds 5. Baby Chemistry How Social Contact Transforms Infants’ Brains 6. Digital Natives Electronic Devices and Children’s Language Development, School Progress, and Happiness 7. Teens and Screens How Digital Technology Has Transformed Teens’ Lives 8.

…

Whether Sarah’s generation will provide the TLC that her relatives require to live to one hundred is anyone’s guess. But when your spouse and your friends—and even your children—have died, people decades younger who call you il tesoro can make a world of difference. But what if you don’t happen to live in an isolated mountaintop village? 3 A Thousand Invisible Threads Face-to-Face Contact and Social Contagion Out of seven billion people in the world, six billion think religion helps them live a long, meaningful life—and science tells us they’re onto something. People who practice a religion are happier, healthier, and live longer than atheists, according to a mountain of empirical evidence.1 One seven-year study of ninety thousand women from across the United States found that those who attended religious services at least once a week were 20 percent less likely to die.

…

There are also other incentives to ensure that an extended family’s babies are clustered by age. Social scientists call these subtle influences “network externalities,” which is just a fancy way of saying that the fun and benefit of doing things together outweighs doing them alone. Could something other than social contagion be at the root of the sibling baby boomlet that follows a sister’s first child? Siblings who are two years apart in age might naturally space their children the same way, for instance, so that the pattern mimics the domino effect. Or perhaps sibs explicitly plan to have children in close succession, thus creating a little soccer team for their extended families.

Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

The Greed of Financial Institutions Caused the Crisis Oskari Juurikkala 27 Financial institutions wanted large profits, therefore they hid the risks they were taking from regulators. Better regulations are important, but businesspeople need to be more responsible and less greedy. 3. “Boom Thinking” Caused the Crisis Robert J. Shiller 32 Boom thinking is a kind of social contagion; once a commodity starts rising in price, people convince themselves and then each other that the price will keep going up. This happened in the United States with home prices, which rose to unsustainable levels. 4. The Weakness of Banking Regulations Caused the Crisis Vince Cable Some British banks have grown too big to fail, and perhaps too big for regulators to handle.

…

Shiller Robert J. Shiller is a professor of economics at Yale University and an economics columnist for the New York Times. In the following viewpoint, Shiller says that the boom in mortgage lending was fueled by a belief that housing prices would rise indefinitely. Shiller calls this belief a “social contagion”—an epidemic of a certain kind of thinking. Since people believe prices will go up, they spend more money, pushing prices further up, and convincing others to spend. Regulators and experts also tend to be caught up in the enthusiasm, creating a speculative bubble that can have complicated and disastrous effects.

…

See Credit risks 45, 87, 88–90, 178, 208, 211– 212 Bad debt Iceland, 18, 102–106 Japan, 1990s, 207 249 The Global Financial Crisis Islamic insulation, 164–169 Philippines, 151–153 regulation repeals/blockages as cause of crisis, 42–52, 205– 206 subprime mortgage dealings, 17–18 See also Bailouts; Bank nationalization; Capital ratios; Guaranteed deposits; Liquidity crises Barclays Capital bank, 44, 46, 47–48 Basis Capital, 88 Baugur, 105 Bear Stearns, 17–18, 49 Bernanke, Ben, 54, 173, 177 Boeri, Tito, 53–58 Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, 184, 196 Bolivia, 161 Bonds corporate, within crisis, 175– 176, 220 Islamic banks, 167–168, 169 Japanese market, 214 suggestion for EU, 97, 99–100 Bonuses, executives, 29, 43, 45, 46, 49 Boom and bust cycles, 59, 61 “Boom thinking,” as cause of crisis, 32–41 Booth, Jenny, 22–26 Brazil, 161–162 BRIC meetings, 146–147 free trade, 180, 184 trade partners, 144, 184 BRIC summits, 146–147 Britain. See United Kingdom Brown, Gordon, 26, 46, 47, 60, 108, 110, 111, 113–114 250 Bubbles “rational,” 39–40 real estate, and social contagion, 35–36, 38–41 real estate, U.S., 16–17, 32, 34, 38–39 real estate, world, 18, 87, 209– 210 stock market, 41, 87 technology economy, 56–57 Building industry economic growth contributions, 34 slowdowns, 131, 133 Bulgaria, 95, 98, 99 Bunning, Jim, 202 Business failures, 19 Business subsidies, 201, 202–206 “Buy American” provisions, stimulus plans, 181–182 C Cable, Vince, 42–52 Calderón, Felipe, 182 California, homelessness, 75, 76–77 Campaign contributions, 201, 206 Canada, 80–84 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 82 Capital ratios, 103, 216–217, 221, 227 Caribbean, 160–161 Carmody, Sean, 85–91 Cash.

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Broken windows theory, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, fudge factor, John Perry Barlow, new economy, operational security, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, social contagion, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

Pittsburgh has two world-class universities, the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Like many institutions of higher learning that are in close proximity, these two have a long-standing rivalry. This competitive spirit was just what we needed to further test our cheating-as-a-social-contagion hypothesis. We conducted all of these experiments at Carnegie Mellon University, and all our participants were Carnegie Mellon students. In the basic Madoff condition, David had worn just a plain T-shirt and jeans and had therefore been assumed to be a Carnegie Mellon student, just like all the other participants.

…

But I do worry about the existence of essay mills and the signal that they send to our students—that is, the institutional acceptance of cheating, not only while they are in school but after they graduate. How to Regain Our Ethical Health? The idea that dishonesty can be transmitted from person to person via social contagion suggests that we need to take a different approach to curbing dishonesty. In general, we tend to view minor infractions as just that: trivial and inconsequential. Peccadilloes may be relatively insignificant in and of themselves, but when they accumulate within a person, across many people, and in groups, they can send a signal that it’s all right to misbehave on a larger scale.

…

For example, Sherron Watkins of Enron, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom are great examples of individuals who stood up to internal misconduct in their own organizations, and in 2002 Time magazine selected them as People of the Year. Acts of honesty are incredibly important for our sense of social morality. And although they are unlikely to make the same sensational news, if we understand social contagion, we must also recognize the importance of publicly promoting outstanding moral acts. With more salient and vivid examples of commendable behavior, we might be able to improve what society views as acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, and ultimately improve our actions. CHAPTER 9 Collaborative Cheating Why Two Heads Aren’t Necessarily Better than One If you’ve ever worked in just about any organization, you know that working in teams accounts for a lot of your time.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

It is well known that a great deal of research investment in behavioural science and ‘decision research’ during the 1950s was driven by military imperatives of the Cold War.14 The University of Michigan, which has been a leading centre of this research since World War Two, and occupies a central place in the evolution of behavioural economics, is a regular recipient of defence-related research contracts, to better understand teamwork and decision-making in combat situations. The science of ‘social contagion’, to which the 2014 Facebook mood manipulation experiment contributed, also has links to US defence interests. The Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 to gather social scientific knowledge on issues and regions of strategic importance to the United States.15 This included a contract with Cornell University to investigate how civil unrest spreads as a social contagion. One of the recipients of Minerva funding at Cornell was communications professor Jeffrey Hancock, who was also one of the researchers on the Facebook study.

…

Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people’s moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands. Empathy and relationships are celebrated, but only as particular habits that happy individuals have learnt to practise. Everything that was once external to economic logic, such as friendship, is quietly brought within it; what was once the enemy of utilitarian logic, namely moral principle, is instrumentalized for utilitarian ends.

…

See positive psychology promise of practical utility of, 91 reunion of with economics, 64, 182 social psychology, 125, 189, 266 theory of, as balancing act, 67 The Psychology of Advertising (Scott), 86 psychopharmacology, 162 psychophysical parallelism, 259 psychophysics, 29, 30, 31 psychosomatic interventions/management/programmes/theories, 122, 124, 128, 135 psychotherapy, 124, 127 pulse rate, 25, 26, 27, 37, 79 punishment, 16, 19, 22, 23, 179, 183, 239 PwC, 119 Qualia, 36 quality of life measures, 126 quantitative sociological research, 98 quantified community, 233, 234 quantified self apps, 221 quantified self movement, 221, 228 quants, 237 questionnaires, 165, 175, 176 random acts of managerial generosity, 184 randomized sampling methods, 97 Rapley, Mark, 250 Rayner, Rosalie, 93 Reagan, Ronald, 144, 149, 159 Realeyes, 72 real-time health data, 137 real-time social trends, 224 recessions, 67–8, 252 Recognizing the Depressed Patient (Ayd), 164 reductionism, 27, 264 research ethics, 91–2, 225 resilience training, 35, 273 Resor, Stanley, 93–4, 95, 96 retail culture, 58 Ricard, Matthieu, 2, 4 Robbins, Lionel, 154 Robins, Eli, 169 Rockefeller Foundation, 97, 99, 121 Rogers, Carl, 146 Roosevelt, Franklin, 101, 146 Rowntree, Joseph, 99 RunKeeper, 240 Ryanair, 185 Salter, Tim, 110 sampling methods, 97–8 Santa Monica, California, 4 São Paolo, Brazil, Clean City Law, 275 scales, 146, 165, 175, 176 scanning technology, 75–6 scent logos, 73 Schrader, Harald, 44 scientific advertising, 215 scientific management, 118–19, 120, 136–7, 235 scientific optimism, 242 scientific politics, 77, 88, 145 scientists, as source of authority, 147–8 Scott, Walter Dill, 83, 85 screen time, 207 second brain, 231 secular religions, 260 selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), 163, 166 self-anchored striving, 147, 166, 175 self-anchoring striving scale, 146 self-forming groups, 200 self-help gurus, 210 self-help literature, 247 self-improvement, 212 self-monitoring, 258 self-optimization, 213 self-reflection, 211 self-surveillance, 221, 230 Seligman, Martin, 165, 277n5 Selye, Hans, 128–31, 133, 264 The Senses and the Intellect (Bain), 48 sentiment analysis/tracking, 6, 221, 223, 261 sexual orientation disturbance, 172 sharing economy, 188 shopping, 58, 74, 93, 188, 239 sick notes, 112 Sing Sing prison, 201 Smail, David, 250 smart cities, 220, 224, 239 smart homes, 239 smart watches, 37 smartphones, 10, 207, 222, 230 smiles/smiling, 36–7, 38 Smith, Adam, 49, 50, 52, 55 social, 1, 36, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 211–12 social analytics, 188, 191, 193, 196 social capitalism, 212 social contagion, science of, 257 social economy, 190 social epidemiology, 9, 250, 254 social media, 188, 189, 199, 203, 207, 208–9, 213, 224, 261, 274 social media addiction, 206, 207 social network analysis, 204, 208 social networks, 193, 194, 195, 196, 213, 225 social neuroscience, 193, 195, 213, 214 social obligation, 184 social optimization, 181–214 social prescribing, 194, 212, 246, 271 social psychology, 125, 189, 266 social research, 98, 202, 226 social science, as converging with physiology into new discipline, 195 sociology, 254 sociometric analysis, 199 sociometric maps, 202 Sociometric Solutions, 239 sociometry, 199, 201, 202, 203 Spengler, Oswald, 121 Spitzer, Robert, 171–3, 176, 271 sponsored conversations, 189 sport, as virtue for political leaders, 140 sporting metaphors, 141 SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), 163, 166 St Louis school of psychiatry, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 179 Stanton, Frank, 99 Stigler, George, 150, 152, 153, 156–7, 158, 160 stress, 37, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 175, 250, 262, 272, 273 Stuckler, David, 252 subjective affect, science of, 6, 7 subjective feelings, relationship with external circumstances, 254 subjective sensation, 30, 45, 55, 61 Suicide (Durkheim), 227 Sully, James, 59, 84 surveillance, 231, 237, 238, 240, 242.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

rules Rustichini, Aldo Ryan, Richard Ryerson University Safire, William satisfaction scale scarcity versus abundance Schmittberger, Rolf Schwarze, Bernd scientific method self-governance selfishness senior citizens, new media tools and Shakesville blog sharing amateurs versus professionals and Apache and as cheating civic sharing communal sharing cost of culture and as default digital networks and frozen sharing limitations on market pricing versus media as means of medical information and Napster and opportunities and personal sharing as social motivation social production and See also making and sharing Shaw, Steven SixDegrees.com skateboarding social capital social change social contagion social media adapting broadcast media versus connectedness and coordination and dynamics of growth and effective group performance and intrinsic motivation and launching limits on lolcats membership and sharing and PickupPal pooled free time and public address and quality of publication and rules versus design and scale and social contagion and unexpected behavior and Ushahidi Wikipedia social motivation connectedness as fines and generosity as gratitude and membership as sharing as verbal feedback as social networks social norms social production combinability and culture and group/individual desires and market culture versus scale and sharing and See also making and sharing social surrogacy Soma puzzle experiment Sooky, Valerie South Korea, beef protests in Sri Ram Sene stability of media environment Stanca, Luca Stern, Howard Stone, Katherine study groups Stutzer, Alois suburbanization success Susan, Nisha Swados, Harvey Tavernise, Sabrina technology behavior and personal social change and television audiences and concept of costs of viewing free time and happiness and loneliness and materialism and production and consumption and social interactions and social surrogacy and young people and Tetzel, John theory-induced blindness Tomasello, Michael Torvalds, Linus traditionalists traditions versus accumulated accidents trust, between men and women Twitter Ultimatum Game U.S.

…

Seen in this light, the Responsible Citizens are not just cleaning up trash—they are attempting to demonstrate positive civic engagement to the people they know, and to the people those people know, and to the people those people know. It’s too soon to handicap the long-term effects of the Responsible Citizens, but without social contagion, their task would be hopeless. With it, their work may help create social change even among strangers. We create one another’s opportunities, whether for passivity or for activity, and we have always done so. The difference today is that the internet is an opportunity machine, a way for small groups to create new opportunities, at lower cost and with less hassle than ever before, and to advertise those opportunities to the largest set of potential participants in history.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Both diseases and ideas can spread from person to person, across similar kinds of networks that connect people, and in this respect, they exhibit very similar structural mechansisms — to the extent that the spread of ideas is often referred to as “social contagion” [84]. Having considered the diffusion of ideas, innovations, and new behaviors in Chapter 19, why then are we revisiting this topic afresh in the context of diseases? In the context of our discussions here about networks, the biggest difference between biological and social contagion lies in the process by which one person “infects” another. With social contagion, people are making decisions to adopt a new idea or innovation, and our models in Chapter 19 were focused on relating the underlying decision-making processes to the larger effects at the network level.

…

We will also find that the diffusion of technologies can be blocked by the boundary of a densely-connected cluster in the network —a “closed community” of individuals who have a high amount of linkage among themselves, and hence are resistant to outside influences. Cascading behavior in a network is sometimes referred to as “social contagion,” because it spreads from one person to another in the style of a biological epidemic. Figure 1.12 reinforces this analogy; it shows the beginning of a tuberculosis outbreak [17] and forms a visual counterpart to the social cascade in Figure 1.11. There are fundamental differences in the underlying mechanisms between social and biological contagion — social contagion tends to involve decision-making on the part of the affected individuals, whereas biological contagion is based on the chance of catching a disease-causing pathogen through contact with another individual.

…

Figure 1.11 shows a small example, 24 CHAPTER 1. OVERVIEW Figure 1.11: When people are influenced by the behaviors their neighbors in the network, the adoption of a new product or innovation can cascade through the network structure. Here, e-mail recommendations for a Japanese graphic novel spread in a kind of informational or social contagion. (Image from Leskovec et al. [267].) in which e-mail recommendations for a particular Japanese graphic novel spread outward from four initial purchasers. By reasoning about the underlying network structure, we will see how it becomes possible for a superior technology to displace a universally-used but inferior one, if the superior technology starts in a portion of the network where it can make progress incrementally, a few people at a time.

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Those of you deciding to pursue careers as economists and nance scholars need to develop a better understanding of asset bubbles—and better ways to communicate this understanding to the nance profession and to the public. As much as Wall Street had a hand in the current crisis, it began as a broadly held belief that housing prices could not fall—a belief that fueled a full-blown social contagion. Learning how to spot such bubbles and deal with them before they infect entire economies will be a major challenge for the next generation of finance scholars. Equipped with sophisticated nancial ideas ranging from the capital asset pricing model to intricate options-pricing formulas, you are certainly and justi ably interested in building materially rewarding careers.

…

The regulators quickly go after small-time crooks, Markopolos argued, but when it comes to large companies, they are “captive to the companies they are supposed to regulate.” Markopolos uncovered substantial evidence that the massive hedge fund run by the respected Wall Street gure Bernard Madoff was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, a fraudulent investment scheme built on a plan for social contagion of enthusiasm among investors. The fund was eventually exposed in 2008. But Markopolos had complained about Mado ’s scheme to the SEC as early as 2000. In 2005, three years before the ultimate collapse of the scheme, Markopolos presented a twenty-one-page document to SEC New York Branch Chief Meaghan Cheung and explained his ndings.

…

. … Thus if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die;—though fears of loss may have a basis no more reasonable than hopes of profit had before.”8 My colleague George Akerlof and I were so convinced of the importance of these uctuations in animal spirits, and of their importance in the world economic crisis, that we wrote a book about it, entitled Animal Spirits.9 Fluctuations in animal spirits that are shared by large numbers of people are, we argued, social phenomena, the result of epidemic social contagion, which makes these uctuations very hard to comprehend and predict. Some of the inherent fragility of our decision-making process can be appreciated if we look introspectively, as we consider our own decisions about whether to launch some risky and time-consuming endeavor. There is a distinct emotional avor to any such decisions.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Finance, September 27, 2019, https://www.msn.com/​en-us/​money/​topstocks/​influencing-set-to-become-dollar10b-industry-by-2020/​vi-AAHWrRc. To understand Obama’s influence, we’d have to know: Gregory Ferenstein, “Dear Klout, This Is How You Measure Influence,” TechCrunch, June 6, 2012, http://techcrunch.com/​2012/​06/​21/​science-social-contagion-klout/. This means thinking about behavior change rather than behavioral tendencies: Sinan Aral, “Commentary—Identifying Social Influence: A Comment on Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion,” Marketing Science 30, no. 2 (2011): 217–23, http://mktsci.journal.informs.org/​content/​30/​2/217.abstract. Dylan Walker and I wanted to untangle that hair ball: Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker, “Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks,” Science 337, no. 6092 (2012): 337–41, http://www.sciencemag.org/​content/​337/​6092/​337.

…

Thomas, and Sonia Hausen, “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (2019): 17753–58. how the digital breadcrumbs we leave on social dating sites: Ravi Bapna et al., “One-Way Mirrors in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment,” Management Science 62, no. 11 (2016): 3100–122. gifting of Chinese Red Packets on WeChat: Yuan Yuan et al., “Social Contagion of Gift Exchange in Online Groups,” arXiv:1906.09698v2 (2019). “emotional contagion”: Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8788–90.

…

Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?,” Journal of Marketing Research 49, no. 2 (2012): 192–205. “We were amazed at how quickly Hotmail spread”: Steve Jurvetson, “What Exactly Is Viral Marketing?,” Red Herring 78 (2000): 110–12. a large-scale randomized experiment on Facebook: Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker, “Creating Social Contagion Through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial of Peer Influence in Networks,” Management Science 57, no. 9 (2011): 1623–39. “$527,000 in a month or almost $6.4 million in a year”: Rachel Strugatz, “Bloggers and Digital Influencers Are Reshaping the Fashion and Beauty Landscape,” Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2016.

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, professors at Harvard, spent significant time mapping the social connections of the 50-year-long Framingham Heart Study, which has followed more than 15,000 people over the course of their lives. The study offers evidence that behaviors and attitudes spread socially among groups of friends and even friends of friends. They called this phenomenon “social contagion” and found that smoking, drinking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness appeared to spread socially. They also document how creativity, wealth, political views, violent tendencies, and happiness spread through social networks.13 The authors concluded that we’re influenced not just by the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors of our immediate circle of friends but also by people within three degrees of separation from us (i.e., our friends’ friends’ friends).

…

life insurance Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) loss aversion Maker’s Schedule Manager’s Schedule marketing, for new jobs Marsh, Nigel Mastermind Dinners (Gaignard) material wealth, vs. personal fulfillment MBA students, planning by McDonald’s mental tasks, combining with physical Merchant, Nilofer MetLife, Study of the American Dream Microsoft middle class impact of home ownership middle managers Mihalic, Joe Mint.com Moment money, perspective on mortgage mortgage calculator National Labor Relations Act National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) negative cash flow net worth, in principal residence networks maintaining 99designs Obituary exercise offer in connecting 168 Hours (Vanderkam) opportunity, income security from opportunity mindset outbound connecting Outliers (Gladwell) overconfidence ownership, vs. access paid leave part-time side gigs passion, pursuing in time off passive income Peers.org pension plans personal branding personal burn rate personal fulfillment, vs. material wealth perspective, time off to change Pew Research Center physical tasks, combining with mental pilot tests planning for best-case scenario in financial flexibility for time off playtime portfolio of gigs building for experiments learning by doing opportunity for connections Postmates power, and expanding time predictors of future feelings priorities checkbook diagnostic exercise on extended family as of others, impact of private sector, job creation decline pro-bono legal adviser Proctor & Gamble Profiting from Uncertainty (Schoemaker) public assistance, eliminating public speaking purchases, time cost of Qapital QuickBooks quitting job, exit strategy for Rae, Amber rates of return, for housing Raw Deal (Hill) referrals, asking for regret, risk of Reich, Robert Reinventing You (Clark) rejuvenation, time off for relationships, impact on success renting growth in households vs. ownership reputation RescueTime resources, allocating to short-term activities vs. long-term goals resume, gaps for time off resume virtues retail workers retirement healthcare costs in new vision of plans to work longer before saving to finance traditional savings plans supplemental income in rewards, time for longer-term risk assessment of of boring life debt and of diploma debt facing fear by identifying size of risk reduction by acceptance by eliminating exercise for facing fear by assessing options with insurance by mitigating risk by shifting risk risk taker, learning to be Rohn, Jim Rolf, David Roth IRA Rowing the Atlantic (Savage) S Corporation S&P 500 companies, average life sabbaticals safety net, creating Sagmeister, Stefan Savage, Roz, Rowing the Atlantic saving for retirement traditional plan savings, financial plan and increase ScheduleOnce Schoemaker, Paul, Profiting from Uncertainty Schrager, Allison security creating from diversifying for income for job self-employment income tax form for risk assessment SEP IRA service workers Shared Security Account Shell, Richard Simmons, Gail skill-based economy, vs. credentials-based economy skill-based employment system, vs. tenure-based employment system skilled workers skills, income security from building Slaughter, Anne-Marie Snapchat social capital, of introducer social contagion social media Social Security Social Security Administration Society for Human Resources Management sole proprietor, independent worker as South by Southwest (SXSW) speaking inbound connecting through skills for specialization spending, auditing Stand Out (Clark) Star Plates start dates, negotiating startup exit strategy for Strayed, Cheryl Stride Health strong ties in network student loans success as contagious defining vision of external versions new American dream as definition refining vision of surrogation sweat equity bucket Target TaskRabbit tax data analysis Tax Policy Center taxes deductions for mortgage interest Schedule C withholding teaching technology for delegating outbound connecting by leveraging technology companies tenure-based employment system, vs. skill-based employment system time age-related difference in perception calculating use employees’ learned helplessness about expanding horizon for savings plan for longer-term rewards management mindfulness about and purchase cost reaction to wasting reclaiming tracking investments time frame, for goals time off benefits developing ideas for exercise financing friends and family reaction gaps in resume from between gigs, vs. paid time off planning for Toastmaster tolerance of risk Ton, Zeynep The Good Jobs Strategy Top Chef Topcoder total cost of home travel Twitter Uber drivers uncertainty, cognitive biases about unearned income unemployment insurance unemployment protection, for self-employed universal basic income (UBI) universality of benefits universities, faculty members Upwork Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center vacation. see also time off Vanderkam, Laura, 168 Hours Vanguard, online calculator Virtues exercise volunteer positions during time off wage insurance Walmart Ware, Bronnie weak ties in network wealth gap WeWork withholding taxes Wolff, Edward work flexibility full-time job disappearance future of workers eliminating categorization of last resort workers’ compensation working lives, end of worst case, facing fear by starting with writing skills inbound connecting through Xero YouCanBook.me ABOUT THE AUTHOR Diane created and teaches The Gig Economy, which was named by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Business School Classes in the country.

The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

Pittsburgh has two world-class universities, the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Like many institutions of higher learning that are in close proximity, these two have a long-standing rivalry. This competitive spirit was just what we needed to further test our cheating-as-a-social-contagion hypothesis. We conducted all of these experiments at Carnegie Mellon University, and all our participants were Carnegie Mellon students. In the basic Madoff condition, David had worn just a plain T-shirt and jeans and had therefore been assumed to be a Carnegie Mellon student, just like all the other participants.

…

But I do worry about the existence of essay mills and the signal that they send to our students—that is, the institutional acceptance of cheating, not only while they are in school but after they graduate. How to Regain Our Ethical Health? The idea that dishonesty can be transmitted from person to person via social contagion suggests that we need to take a different approach to curbing dishonesty. In general, we tend to view minor infractions as just that: trivial and inconsequential. Peccadilloes may be relatively insignificant in and of themselves, but when they accumulate within a person, across many people, and in groups, they can send a signal that it’s all right to misbehave on a larger scale.

…

For example, Sherron Watkins of Enron, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom are great examples of individuals who stood up to internal misconduct in their own organizations, and in 2002 Time magazine selected them as People of the Year. Acts of honesty are incredibly important for our sense of social morality. And although they are unlikely to make the same sensational news, if we understand social contagion, we must also recognize the importance of publicly promoting outstanding moral acts. With more salient and vivid examples of commendable behavior, we might be able to improve what society views as acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, and ultimately improve our actions. CHAPTER 9 Collaborative Cheating Why Two Heads Aren’t Necessarily Better than One If you’ve ever worked in just about any organization, you know that working in teams accounts for a lot of your time.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

But even a small change in voting behaviour can make a massive difference to the number of people voting. By matching Facebook users against the electoral register, James and his colleagues estimated that they had created at least 60,000 new voters as a direct result of having seen the message, and at least a further 280,000 who had voted as a result of the social contagion created by the message. A small nudge made a big change to the number of people participating in democracy. The political study showed that Facebook messages could have an effect on our everyday lives. The next step, taken by Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer, together with two Cornell researchers, was to look at the overall emotional effect of messages.

…

Irrespective of Trump’s potential involvement, these campaigns haven’t, as yet, created the click juice that allows them to be major influencers. Over a billion dollars is spent on presidential campaigns by the candidates, dwarfing the Russia-backed investment. While it is true, in theory, that a small investment can grow through ‘also liking’ and social contagion, there is no credible evidence that this happened in the case of the Russian adverts. There are problems with Google Search, Facebook’s filtering and Twitter’s trending. But we also have to remember that these are absolutely amazing tools. Occasionally, a search will lift up information that is incorrect and offensive, to its front page.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

It is the online equivalent of the viruses and bacteria that have (literally) plagued society for as long as society has existed. QAnon is not a digital virus in the sense of a computer virus, something that can damage our data or give a hacker access to our data. It is a pathogen that affects us, but instead of transmitting by bodily contact or breath, it transmits online – the ultimate form of social contagion. Social media is engineered to make things go viral. This mechanism inevitably gives rise to viral phenomena far beyond any individual meme or idea, and far more dangerous. Just as we developed public health, vaccination, antibiotics and more to tackle real-world pandemics, we need to develop a toolkit to tackle the online equivalents – because while QAnon is the first digital pandemic, it won’t be the last.

…

Though this wasn’t intrinsically a part of QAnon, it was one of many adjuncts which had a considerable overlap in membership and often in ideology – and in its members’ propensity to violence. Between 2018 and 2020, this web of related movements – Gamergate, the alt-right, QAnon and the incel movement – spawned an increasing number of violent attacks, primarily in the US but then across the world. The threat this book is warning about is one of social contagion – of corners of the internet turning into spawning grounds for dangerous ideas, which then intermingle, merge and spread into the wider world. As such, looking at any one incident and trying to tie it to solely the incel movement, the online far right or the core of QAnon is to misunderstand the nature of the threat each poses.

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan

cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, epigenetics, meta-analysis, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, social contagion, traumatic brain injury

It’s likely that schools are particularly vulnerable to this disorder because they group people very closely, restricting their rights and limiting their autonomy. Young people’s brains are still developing and the adolescent years are those in which peer pressure is felt most keenly, making school-children at higher risk of social contagion. In the past, convents were also common sites for mass hysteria for the same sorts of reasons. Young women were isolated and subjected to extremely restricted lives, which is the atmosphere which fosters MPI. Other environments conducive to mass hysteria are those in which there is reason to worry about environmental poisons or attacks – factories, for example, especially those using potentially dangerous chemicals.

…

Publicly painting them in this disparaging way forced the girls and their families into a position of having to defend themselves; they emphasized that they did not experience their lives as being in any way bleak and therefore refused the diagnosis of conversion disorder. If having conversion disorder meant they were stressed, then it couldn’t be right. It is likely that, at the beginning of the outbreak, one of the girls began to genuinely suffer from a disorder like Tourette’s, and that the social contagion to which teenagers are vulnerable created the spread of tics within a friendship group. Responsibility for the subsequent evolution of the crisis, however, lies firmly at the feet of the media. In fact, it was withdrawing the girls from the media spotlight that finally saved them and the town.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The tools of the fourth industrial revolution enable new forms of surveillance and other means of control that run counter to healthy, open societies. Source: Global Risks Report 2016, World Economic Forum * * * As an example, a study of the impact of get-out-the-vote messages on Facebook found that they “increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes.”59 This research highlights the power that digital media platforms have in selecting and promoting the media we consume online. It also indicates the opportunity for online technologies to blend traditional forms of civic engagement (such as voting for local, regional or national representatives) with innovative ways to give citizens more direct influence over decisions that affect their communities.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

For instance, when people flouted rules of mask-wearing or physical distancing in parts of the United States in May 2020, they reinforced one another’s perceptions of safety and control in a way that was counterproductive to their own interests and to those of our society.35 The large parties I saw in photographs taken in Missouri, Michigan, and Florida in June 2020 reminded me of a miniature version of the dancing manias seen long ago. As noted above, in the case of the possible parallel epidemics of a virus and of fear, there can be both biological and social contagions. People generally copy the visible behaviors of those around them, so there can be tipping points in both directions. As more and more people start to wear masks and obey rules of physical distancing, more people follow suit. Conversely, as more and more people ignore these practices, fewer people take them seriously.

…

Adults Report Less Worry, More Happiness,” Gallup, May 18, 2020, accessed May 24, 2020. 15 “Coronavirus Pandemic,” Gallup, accessed May 24, 2020. 16 M. Brenan, “Targeted Quarantines Top U.S. Adults’ Conditions for Normalcy,” Gallup, May 11, 2020, accessed May 24, 2020. 17 F. Fu et al., “Dueling Biological and Social Contagions,” Scientific Reports 2017; 7: 43634. 18 J.M. Epstein et al., “Couple Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease: Mathematical and Computational Explorations,” PLOS ONE 2008; 3: e3955. 19 S. Taylor, The Psychology of Pandemics, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publications, 2020. 20 K. King, “Daily Cheers Give Morale Boost to Medical Workers Fighting Coronavirus,” Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2020; A.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

(Okay, maybe we should try pumping oxytocin into the air the next time the U.N. Security Council meets … interesting things might happen. But then again, it would more likely end up more in the ventilation systems of car dealership salesrooms than international treaty negotiations.) Social Capital, Reputation, and Social Contagion It turns out you can’t apply for a job as a New York City doorman. There are no want ads, no job postings, no online applications. As Peter Bearman showed a few years ago, becoming a doorman in New York “is both impossible and too easy.” Doormen in New York are recruited through social networks, and only from social networks.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart by James R. Doty, Md

Isaac Newton, Silicon Valley, social contagion

A desire to see others cared for with no desire for personal benefit or recognition. The extraordinary thing is that research is now finding that your act of kindness not only benefits those who receive your kindness but benefits you as well. The act of kindness ripples out and makes it more likely that your friends and those around you will be kinder. It is a social contagion that puts our society right. And ultimately kindness returns back to us, in the good feelings it generates and in how others treat us . . . with kindness. L: Love when given freely changes everyone and everything. It is love that contains all virtues. It is love that heals all wounds. Ultimately, it is not our technology or our medicine but our love that heals.

The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty by Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Broken windows theory, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, Gavin Belson, hive mind, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, Larry Ellison, off-the-grid, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs

By leaving Cleveland the first time, LeBron demonstrated a willingness to hurt local feelings in pursuit of happiness. The backlash was incredible but James ultimately survived, as did his reputation. The move gave LeBron leverage. Who could now doubt his willingness to leave at the drop of a hat? It also gave leverage to other superstars. A precedent had been set, which fueled a kind of social contagion among elite players. Unusually candid NBA veteran Jared Dudley told me over the phone, “I’m not surprised players almost want shorter contracts now. And because of that, players have more power. Players are flexing it. We’re doing that and it’s now gotten to a point where someone like Kawhi [can] change the game, say hey, I’m only playing sixty-five games and he’s telling you before.

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak by Rosie Wilby

Airbnb, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Santayana, Jeremy Corbyn, Kintsugi, lateral thinking, lockdown, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social contagion, social distancing, zero-sum game

To be a lesbian in a romantic relationship is like perching anxiously at a cliff’s edge looking down to the wild seas of love addiction below…and wondering when you’ll be pulled back in. When I’m surrounded by the acrimonious wreckage of my friends’ partnerships, I begin to wonder if I’m misguided in my belief that Girlfriend and I will survive. Surely every time someone close to us breaks up, it increases the probability that we will? As the social contagion closes in, I become more reclusive. Nevertheless I feel an urge to make contact with Lena. But it’s tricky. A message will alert her that Becky has already told us about the split and presented her side of the story. I decide to go for it. ‘How are you? We heard about you and Becky and were really sad and surprised.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

Connected. The methodology in this research has been critiqued more recently. For details, see the following papers: VanderWeele, T. J. “Sensitivity Analysis for Contagion Effects in Social Networks.” Sociological Methods and Research 40 (2011): 240–55; Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler. “Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks.” Statistics in Medicine 32, no. 4 (February 20, 2013): 556–77. 81 “[c]onclusions based on such work”: Gould, Stephen Jay. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. 83–84 an article in the British Medical Journal: Hamblin, T.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

Video retrieved from www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1720981828166095. Pixar blurred the traditional lines between workers: Catmull, Ed. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House Canada, 2014. phenomenon which explains why we embrace religion: “Memetics and Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” Journal of Memetics—Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/marsden_p.html (accessed December 2019). Google fails at 40 percent of everything they start: Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It by Kelly McGonigal

banking crisis, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, delayed gratification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Easter island, game design, impulse control, lifelogging, loss aversion, low interest rates, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, phenotype, Richard Thaler, social contagion, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

.: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics, www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html#State. Pages 185–186—Contagion of obesity: Christakis, N. A., and J. H. Fowler. “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years.” New England Journal of Medicine 357 (2007): 370–79. Page 186—Social contagion studies: Fowler, J. H., and N. A. Christakis. “Estimating Peer Effects on Health in Social Networks: A Response to Cohen-Cole and Fletcher; and Trogdon, Nonnemaker, and Pais.” Journal of Health Economics 27 (2008): 1400–05. See also Rosenquist, J. N., J. Murabito, J. H. Fowler, and N. A. Christakis.

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

It insists that the environment should remain unchanged, that the food industry will do business as usual, and that pious government officials will continue to defend the status quo while claiming credit for taking action. The picture startlingly resembles the history of the tobacco industry, which argued that damage caused by dangerous products were the fault of the people who used them. BOTTOM-UP VERSUS TOP-DOWN PRIORITIES (CREATING SOCIAL CONTAGION) Will change occur from the top down, with central governments taking the lead? Or will it come from the bottom up, with grassroots, local, and state changes forcing central change? It appears that the victories are occurring in a bottom-up fashion in the United States, but in Europe and Scandinavia there is more hope for constructive action from the top.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/opinion/the-worrisome-future-of-policing-technology.html 4. Lum, K., Isaac, W. (2016). To predict and serve? Significance, 13:14–19. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x 5. Papachristos, A.V., Wildeman, C., Roberto, E. (2015). Tragic, but not random: The social contagion of nonfatal gunshot injuries. Social Science & Medicine, Jan; 125:139–150. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.01.056 6. Zhao, L., Papachristos, A.V. (2020). Network position and police who shoot. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 687(1):89–112. doi: 10.1177/0002716219901171 7.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The results laid bare the fearsome power of Facebook. In 2014 the company ran another experiment: it doctored the nature of the stories that appeared in the News Feed of 689,003 users so that they skewed either more negative or positive than normal, and from there tracked the spread of what it called social contagion. “These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks,” wrote the study’s principal investigator. Smith announced a powerful new partnership between BuzzFeed and Facebook that would give his newsroom (along with ABC News) exclusive access to the social network’s proprietary analytics, revealing how American users felt about various politicians, policies, and events.

…

., of 2016, 2 BuzzFeed coverage of, 138, 313–17, 320 divisiveness of, 281 Facebook and, 303 fake news and, 320, 322 Russian interference in, 326, 341–42, 381, 382, 383 see also Clinton, Hillary, in 2016 election campaign; Trump, Donald, in 2016 election campaign Emanuel, Ari, 178 Emergent, 310 Emerson Collective, 343 emotional charge, of news stories, 111 Entous, Adam, 406, 411 Esquire, 268 Eyebeam, 18–19 Facebook, 6, 31–32, 106, 108, 132, 204, 275, 415 accused of liberal bias, 292–93 Audience Optimization Tool of, 282 beginnings of, 95–96 BuzzFeed added to list of trusted sources of, 317 BuzzFeed’s community-specific pages on, 337–38 BuzzFeed’s reliance on, 103, 104, 132, 153, 272, 276, 277, 295, 301, 303–4, 311, 329, 428 Cambridge Analytica and, 279, 298 conspiracy theory stories on, 296 constantly changing algorithms of, 105–6, 271–72, 282, 290–91, 295, 302, 329, 332, 337 criticized for lack of control over content, 154 Custom Audiences tool of, 298 dangerous omnipotence of, 400 Dark Post tool of, 298–99 data mining by, 271, 274, 278, 341 data security issues of, 279, 342, 400 decline of sharing on, 282 demographic of, 106–7 digital advertising dominated by, 7, 27, 254, 367, 397, 404, 428 emotional resonance as touchstone for, 273 expanded reach of publishers’ posts on, 291 explosive growth of, 31, 104 fake news spread by, 277, 289, 295, 296–97, 317, 322, 427–28 growing influence of, 274, 280, 303, 309 human editors controversy at, 291–94, 295–96, 317 Instant Articles on, 267, 280–81, 329–30, 412 Like button of, 107–8, 109 live-video streaming tool of, 314 news content on, 124 in pivot to video, 329, 332 political ads on, 278 political polarization and, 273–74, 279–80, 281, 282–83, 312 Post and, 96–97, 232–33 priority of friends vs. publishers’ posts on, 276, 281–82 psychographics and, 278–79 publishers and, 272–73 ranking of stories on, 275–77 Russian fake news spread by, 289, 341–42, 420 “sentiment data” of, 303–5 “social contagion” experiment of, 303 supposed neutrality of, 274 targeted advertising on, 277–78, 298, 341 Facebook (cont.) targeting of news stories by, 279–80, 281 trending section of, 291–94, 295–96, 317 Trump campaign’s use of psychographic data from, 298–99 unauthorized sharing of personal data by, 428 users’ burden of choice relieved by, 271–72, 273 users’ experience as priority of, 272 users’ given greater control over content on, 282 Facebook Effect, The (Kirkpatrick), 96 Facebook Live, 281, 412 Facebook worldview, Google worldview vs., 103 Fahrenthold, David, 408–11, 419 fake news, 80, 95, 212, 277, 320 appearance of authority in, 295 Facebook’s role in spread of, 289, 295, 296–97, 317, 322, 427–28 impact on 2016 election of, 320, 322 internet and, 386 Russian use of, 289, 341–42, 420 Silverman’s investigation of, 294–95, 296–98, 299, 309, 340–41 Trump campaign and, 277, 296, 297, 299–300 Trump’s co-opting of term, 340 and 2016 election, 322 virality of, 295 Fallon, Brian, 379, 380 Fallows, James, 252 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (Thompson), 133 Federal Trade Commission, native advertising and, 136–37 feedback, journalists’ craving for, 246 Ferrante, Anthony, 326 Ferraro, Nick, 424 Fiasco (Ricks), 230 financial crisis of 2008, 8, 62, 225, 227 Financial Times, 42, 336 paying digital readers of, 183, 192 Fiorina, Carly, 138 Fire and Fury (Wolff), 324 First Amendment, 8, 9, 226, 331, 424 Bezos as vigorous defender of, 257–58, 420–21 Fisher, Ian, 247 FiveThirtyEight, 190, 248 Fix, The (Post blog), 94, 239, 405 Flynn, Michael, 392, 416 Foer, Franklin, 417 Foley, James, 175 Forbes, 163 foreign correspondents, post-9/11 safety training of, 172–73 Founders, importance of free press to, 8, 9, 89, 424 4chan, 283, 299, 313, 353, 355 Fourth Estate, The (documentary), 374 Fox News, 58, 60, 80, 387, 420, 429 Frank, Ze, 19, 122, 333 as head of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, 331–32, 333–34, 336–37 Frankel, Max, 429 Frank Stanton Award for Excellence in Communications, 180 Freedom of Information Act, 178 Freston, Tom, 20, 58, 152, 154–55, 159, 180 Friedman, Thomas, 1, 68, 411 Friendster, 37 Frons, Marc, 192 Fusion GPS, 323 Future of News Group, 76 Gannett chain, 182 Gara, Tom, 342–43, 344–45 Gateway Pundit, 338 Gawker, 23, 73, 138, 164, 316, 326 as Chartbeat client, 246–47 Vice’s low wages exposed by, 175 Geddes, John, 220 Geffen, David, 188 Geidner, Chris, 140 Gelb, Arthur, 75, 185 Gellman, Barton, 260 General Electric, 161 Gerth, Jeff, 389–90 Gibson, Janine: Abramson’s job offer to, 220–21, 222 at BuzzFeed, 224, 301 Gingrich, Newt, 20, 132 Gionet, Tim, 312 Girard, René, 273 Giuliani, Rudy, 316 Gizmodo, 292, 293 Gladwell, Malcolm, 19, 112 Glasser, Susan, 223 Globe and Mail, 48 Goldacre, Ben, 248 Golden, Michael, 65–66, 74, 81, 187, 202, 207, 211, 213, 394 Gonzalez, Claudia, 202 Good Morning, America (TV show), 146 Google, 6, 74 analytics program of, 244 criticized for lack of control over content, 154 digital advertising dominated by, 7, 27, 254, 367, 397, 404, 428 disruptive business model of, 26–27 9/11 attacks and, 28 Peretti’s gaming of search system of, 29, 30 top-down organization of information by, 104 YouTube bought by, 54, 153 Google News, 28–29 Google Trends, 38 Google worldview, Facebook worldview vs., 103 Government Accountability Office, 252 Government Communications Headquarters (British), 215 Graham, Donald E., 1–2, 66, 225, 228, 265 character and personality of, 82, 84 Coll’s plan for global digital expansion rejected by, 87 cuts to news staff by, 82, 88–89, 92 difficulty expressing a future vision of, 84–85, 97–98 digital and print news staffs kept separate by, 89, 97 diversification by, 82–83 Facebook investment offered by, 96–97 Harris and VandeHei’s proposal rejected by, 98 Kaiser’s proposals shelved by, 86 Kaplan defended by, 253 local news as focus of, 83, 85, 86, 87–88 named Washington Post publisher, 83 paywall instituted by, 254 Post reporting assignments of, 84 and sale of Post, 255–56, 257, 258–59 social media and, 232 U.S. invasion of Iraq promoted by, 92 Vietnam service of, 83 as Washington police officer, 83–84 Zuckerberg’s friendship with, 97, 257 Graham, Katharine, 9, 82, 97 as Post publisher, 225 Watergate scandal and, 261, 408 Graham, Mary, 84 Graham, Philip, 1, 83 Graham family: commitment to quality journalism of, 226 in decision to sell Post, 255–57, 261 Gray, Rosie, 130, 131, 313 Grayer, Jonathan, 90–92 Great Britain, Brexit vote in, 279 Green, Joshua, 285 Greenhouse, Linda, 66–67 Gregg, Arthur, 1, 65 Gregg, Gail, 65, 183 Gregory, David, 389 Guardian, 112, 141, 171, 219, 222, 298, 301, 319 Abramson’s column for, 224, 320–21, 382 Snowden scoop of, 214–15, 220, 260, 268 Gubarev, Aleksej, 327 Gullah people, 155 Haberman, Clyde, 374 Haberman, Maggie, 314, 374, 390 Trump’s relationship with, 388–89 Haik, Cory, 227, 232, 249, 250, 264, 266 Haile, Tony, 244–46, 247 Scroll founded by, 247 see also Chartbeat Halberstam, David, 3–4, 6, 376 Hall, Ellie, 143 Harmony Institute, 110 Harris, John, 97–98, 406 Politico founded by, 98–99 Harvard Business Review, 139 Harvard Crimson, 84 Hastings, Michael, 130, 132–33 hate literature, 43 HBO, 178 Vice news shows on, see Vice (HBO weekly show); Vice News Tonight Hearst, 103 Heekin-Canedy, Scott, 192 Henry, John and Linda, 259, 423 Here Comes Everybody (Shirky), 196 Herron, Liz, 203–4 Hersh, Josh, 351 Hiatt, Fred, 92 Hicks, Tyler, 208 Hill, Anita, 196 Hills, Steve, 89, 231–32, 251, 254–55 Hilton, Shani, 142, 332 Hippeau, Eric, 103 HIVE, 330–31 Hoedemækers, Casper, 47 Hoft, Jim, 338 Holderness, Cates, 145–46 Howard, Rebecca, as head of video, 217 How to Piss in Public (McInnes), 58 Huffington, Arianna, 20, 21–22, 29, 30, 285, 347 Huffington, Michael, 20 Huffington Post, 73, 197, 242, 283, 305 AOL’s acquisition of, 123 celebrity stories on, 23 failed live streaming project of, 347 founding of, 22–23, 33, 285 poorly paid news staff of, 25 readers’ enthusiasms as driver of content on, 24–25 rewritten news stories of, 28–30 “stickiness” of, 23, 30 unpaid bloggers on, 23–24, 25 Hughes, Chris, 95 Hull, Anne, 233 Hunt, Al, 195–96 Hurley, Chad, 53 Hylton, Antonia, 366 Ifill, Gwen, 407 Ikea, 52, 160–61 Independent, 119 Indian Ocean, 2004 tsunami in, 53 Information, the, 282 information explosion, 26 InfoWars, 324 Ingrassia, Larry, 205 Instagram, 332 Intel, 162–63 International Herald Tribune, 65, 81 Times’s purchase of Post’s share in, 66, 86 International New York Times, 211 international reporting, 10 internet: as alternative to corporate media, 18 alt-right movement and, 353 cats and, 36 conspiracy theories spread by, 283, 405 data mining as accepted part of, 271 explosion of social media on, 30–32 extremism on, 312–13 fake news and, 386 information explosion on, 26 measurement of traffic on, 243, 246; see also Chartbeat newspapers’ business model challenged by, 75–76 as news sewer, 193 platforms vs. content providers on, 153–54 readers’ expectations of free content on, 23–24, 25, 26 and speeding up of news cycle, 239–40 targeting of news stories on, 279–80, 281 and unbundling of newspapers, 52 Internet Research Agency, 341–42, 382 investigative journalism, 10, 301, 366, 408 by BuzzFeed News, 141, 301, 302, 345 cost of, 2 First Amendment protection of, 8, 9 at Post, 141, 230, 233, 408 scandalmongering and, 382–83 speeded-up news cycle as enemy of, 383 at Times, 141, 142, 205–7, 210, 408 iPhone, impact on digital news media of, 32–33, 95 Iraq War, 174 Post’s misreporting of lead-up to, 92–94, 95 Times’s misreporting of lead-up to, 3, 78–79, 92, 94, 95, 184 Isidore Newman School, 14–15 Isis, Vice documentary on, 174–75 Jackass (TV show), 51–52, 152 Jarvis, Jeff, 76, 193 Jewish Daily Forward, 125 Jindal, Bobby, 138 Jobs, Laurene Powell, 343 Jobs, Steve, 32, 95 Johnson, John, 19, 110 Jones, Alex, 324 Jones, Ellis, 176 Jones, Saeed, 345 Jonze, Spike, 180 advertising spots by, 52, 160–61 background and early career of, 50–51 Jackass created by, 51–52, 152 as Vice creative director, 57 and Vice’s move into video, 50, 56–57, 152 journalism, see investigative journalism; long-form journalism; news media Kaczynski, Andrew, 129, 131–32, 299, 317 Trump campaign covered by, 313–14, 316–17 Kahn, Joe, 208 Kaiser, Robert, 85–86, 89, 262 Kakutani, Michiko, 402 Kaminer, Ariel, 142 Kantor, Jodi, 210 Kantrowitz, Alex, 282 Kaplan, 83 and changed student-loan regulations, 252 Don Graham’s defense of, 253 government investigation of, 252–54 growth of, 90–91 plummeting revenues of, 254 Post newspaper revenues eclipsed by, 91 Post’s ownership of, 252 sales pitches of, 252–53 Kaplan, Peter, 127, 131 Kaplan, Stanley H., 90 Kardashian, Kim, 335 Karim, Jawed, 53 Kaus, Mickey, 94 Kay, Alan, 85 Keller, Bill, 29, 184, 193, 209, 429 Abramson’s relationship with, 195, 198 and blurring of line between editorial and business departments, 69–70 foreign news as strong suit of, 195 Marshall Project of, 237 news staff cuts by, 190–91 paywall on website favored by, 192, 193 retirement of, 194, 197, 198 as stickler for fairness in reporting, 66–67 Sulzberger Jr. and, 66, 67–68 as Times’s executive editor, 66, 187 and Times’s reporting scandals, 78–80 on use of metrics in editorial decisions, 242, 245 Kellner, Amy, 48 Kerry, John, in 2004 election, 20, 21 Kim Jong-il, 166 Kim Jong-un, 134, 167 Kirkpatrick, David, 96 Klein, Ezra, 239, 248, 266, 405 Kleinfield, N.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

So even if each one of your influencers can influence three other ordinary people, you will still need to find and influence a million of them, which is rather different from what the law of the few promises. As it turns out, there’s a solution to this problem as well, but it requires that we incorporate another related but distinct idea from network theory—that of social contagion. THE ACCIDENTAL INFLUENTIALS Contagion—the idea that information, and potentially influence, can spread along network ties like an infectious disease—is one of the most intriguing ideas in network science. As we saw in the last chapter, when everyone is being influenced by what other people are doing, surprising things can happen.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Conceptually, computerized information systems in the social service system are not very different from invasive home visits by caseworkers, extensive case records, or evaluations in workhouses by “overseers of the poor.”1 Politically, the purposes of surveying the poor have largely stayed constant for three centuries: containment of alleged social contagion, evaluation of moral suitability for inclusion in public life and its benefits, and suppression of working people’s resistance and collective power. Practically, being lined up and poked for immunizations is not unlike having an embedded microchip scanned at the welfare office. Using marginalized people as test populations for technologies of state surveillance and control is not unique to the information age.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

This statement, in particular, reflects the efforts of ‘a bunch of trans women occupiers’ to assert the necessity of moving from rhetorical gestures at inclusivity to actual practices of solidarity. Aaron Bady has consistently offered insights about the specifically urban settings of Occupy ever since Occupy Oakland established its downtown encampment. Here, he discusses the trope that merges political disruption and social contagion: the problem of ‘vermin’. The response – and lack of response – of radical communities to sexual violence has been a recurrent issue in US social-justice movements. The OWS Safer Spaces Working Group describes the general problem, and, by recounting their own approach to a particular sexual assault, offers a model to others.

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

In the context of social networks in the financial world, there is evidence that “individual decision makers often pay attention to the actions, decisions, and even beliefs (such as risk perceptions) of others to whom they are linked socially.”16 It is precisely in this sense that we believe innovation and technology have also shaped the risk from contagious diseases; in addition to the physical channels of transmission, we need to be aware of the risks related to “‘social’ contagion.”17 An additional challenge is managing the dissemination of information about sensitive research. An example has been the debate surrounding the decision by the U.S. government to request that the leading scientific journals Nature and Science withhold the publication of research regarding the evolution of the H5N1 influenza virus.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

In retrospect, he wrote, the piece was the worst combination, i.e. good writing, bad facts: “One Time researcher assigned to my story remembers the study as ‘one of the more shameful, fear-mongering and unscientific efforts that we ever gave attention to.’” Nonetheless, the Time cover caused political figures like Ralph Reed and Chuck Grassley to spring into action demanding censorship of the Interwebs. Another early Time cover telling parents to worry about the impact of video games may not have predicted mass social contagion, but did hint at a future football star (“GRONK! FLASH! ZAP!”). There were constant variations on “techno-panic” themes, suggesting new technologies would addict children to profanity, violence, peeping, sexual deviancy, and other terrors. Moral panics tended to have the most profound consequences for “folk devils” who were politically underrepresented.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

Around the same time, Watts was on the phone with his dad, who asked if he’d ever heard of this idea that everyone in the world is connected to the president of the United States by just six handshakes. It was 1995, and Watts hadn’t heard the theory before. He didn’t know if it was obviously true or obviously false. But he started to think that crickets and the six degrees of separation were two parts of the same story. He wondered whether social contagions—like cricket sounds, clothing fashions, and pop culture hits—might be governed by the rules of mass behavior. Perhaps the fundamental question of hits isn’t “Why do we like what we like?” but rather “How does what you like become what I like?” One reason why I like Watts—even though, in our meeting, he relished poking holes in some of my theories—is that he is completely unsentimental about why some products succeed, and he’s very good at explaining the pitfalls of sentimental explanations.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The formal rules set by governments interact with informal ones to shape the economy. The effect of the informal, the social norms, shouldn’t be underestimated, as the example of the spread of greed in finance and big corporations and from there to the rest of society so clearly shows. Indeed economists have shown that there is a social contagion in many dimensions of life, such as obesity, crime, or suicide.6 Governments can influence social norms—examples of successful antismoking campaigns show how powerful government action can be. However, our own behavior as individuals, and our own social relationships, are important too. We can and should change our own patterns of spending.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In one study of 61 million Facebook users, news feeds with positive social pressure caused roughly 2 percent more people to vote or at least declare that they had voted relative to people who did not receive such messages. In fact, Facebook social messaging increased turnout directly by about 60,000 people and indirectly by about 280,000 more people via social contagion.50 While there is no evidence that election outcomes changed, one can imagine close races where a 2 percent margin affects who wins. It’s an interesting finding—one that Facebook advertisers and others seeking to influence the attitudes and behaviors of large numbers of people might find valuable.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Conformity relates to social and emotional contagion where, say, a primate aggressively targets an individual just because someone else is already doing so. Such contagion even works between groups. For example, among marmosets aggression in a group becomes more likely if aggressive vocalizations are heard from the neighboring group. Other primates are even subject to the social contagion of yawning.*52 My favorite example of nonhuman conformity is so familiar that it could come right out of high school. A male grouse courts a female who, alas, doesn’t feel magic in the air and rebuffs him. The researchers then make him seem like the hottest stud on the prairie—by surrounding him with some rapt, stuffed female grouse.

…

., “Transitive Inference in Pigeons: Simplified Procedures and a Test of Value Transfer Theory,” Animal Learning & Behav 23 (1995): 76; A. B. Bond et al., “Social Complexity and Transitive Inference in Corvids,” Animal Behav 65 (2003): 479; L. Grosenick et al., “Fish Can Infer Social Rank by Observation Alone,” Nat 445 (2007): 429. 52. C. Watson and C. Caldwell, “Neighbor Effects in Marmosets: Social Contagion of Agonism and Affiliation in Captive Callithrix jacchus,” Am J Primat 72 (2010): 549; K. Baker and F. Aureli, “The Neighbor Effect: Other Groups Influence Intragroup Agonistic Behavior in Captive Chimpanzees,” Am J Primat 40 (1996): 283. 53. L. A. Dugatkin, “Animals Imitate, Too,” Sci Am 283 (2000): 67. 54.

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

Much of the recruitment had taken place in the months before the war. At Slough, it helped that the depot was housed on the huge trading estate. Factory workers were approached on-site. Bleeding teams went into the countryside to recruit, with success. Around the country, regional depots were doing similar work. And there was also by now social contagion. Giving blood was an accepted social good. In 1939, when the first evacuees were sent from the city to the countryside, Londoners used to the idea of donation spread the notion. “In a Hampshire village,” reported the Times, “a London woman who has moved there was asked if she could obtain some more donors for the blood transfusion service.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

* * * *1 The Fairfax story is often included in with other legendary bear-raid stories involving companies like Overstock.com, Dendreon, Afinsa (a Spanish collectibles company), and Biovail, another Canadian firm, all of which were targeted by some of the same hedge funds described in this story, many of which ended up out of business and/or mired in scandal. Many of those tales revolve around the issue of naked short selling, a type of financial counterfeiting that allows short investors to artificially depress the stock prices of target companies. Whether naked short selling is a serious social contagion or meaningless conspiracy theory is a passionately debated topic on Wall Street, and to even broach the subject inspires strong emotions: right or wrong (and I believe wrong), in some quarters, if you bring it up at all, eyes roll automatically. One of the reasons I originally shied away from the Fairfax story was that it has a naked short-selling angle that makes some serious observers dismiss it out of hand as nutty conspiracy.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

It’s the city’s changing ethnic mix, which makes some people uncomfortable, and the graffiti on the subways, the dirt on the streets and a lot of other things.” The company’s surveys found that “a substantial majority” of executives and managers, down to those earning $15,000 a year, wanted Union Carbide to move. It is difficult—no, dangerous—to ignore the economic and social contagion that has swept New York City. The contagion observes few borders. Between 1970 and 1975, New York State lost 2.5 percent of all its nonagricultural jobs. In that same period, the nation’s nonagricultural employment leaped 7.4 percent. The state’s economic stagnation, a 1977 report by Syracuse University economist Roy Bahl disclosed, meant the loss of $6 billion in potential tax revenues since 1973.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

The idea that a man as respectful of American power as Stalin was would commit his badly wounded nation to a venture as foolhardy as the attempted destruction of the United States was ludicrous, but that is what many men in Washington wanted to hear. Having just triumphed over the expansionist monster Hitler and the forces of Imperial Japan, they seemed, unconsciously, to be seeking a new monster with whom to do mortal combat. The perception of Communism as some sort of international social contagion that could, by almost biological means, infect and destroy society was also widespread in the United States. If Russia was a society with a profound sense of insecurity, as Kennan maintained, America was equally so. Kennan’s Long Telegram was not only the longest in the history of the U.S. Foreign Service, it was also the most enthusiastically welcomed and widely read.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

The caprice in the rise and fall of names, which are the most easily tracked bits of culture, suggests we should be skeptical of most explanations for the life cycles of other mores and customs, from why men stopped wearing hats to why neighborhoods become segregated. But it also points to the patterns of individual choice and social contagion that might someday make sense of them. WORDS AND EMOTIONS The shifting associations to the name for a person are an example of the power of a word to soak up emotional coloring—to have a connotation as well as a denotation. The concept of a connotation is often explained by the conjugational formula devised by Bertrand Russell in a 1950s radio interview: I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

“The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people,” wrote the authors, later adding, “The Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for total of 340,000 additional votes. That represents about 0.14% of the voting age population of about 236 million in 2010.” In a nation of close elections, such numbers could be decisive. Even more disturbing was the idea that Facebook could use that power to manipulate people to get the results it wanted.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364 (1528), 2391–404. Bauer, M., Blattman, C., Chytilová, J., Henrich, J., Miguel, E., and Mitts, T. (2016). Can war foster cooperation? Journal of Economic Perspectives 30 (3), 249–74. Bauer, M., Cahlíková, J., Chytilová, J., and Želinský, T. (2018). Social contagion of ethnic hostility. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (19), 4881–86. Bauer, M., Cassar, A., Chytilová, J., and Henrich, J. (2014). War’s enduring effects on the development of egalitarian motivations and in-group biases. Psychological Science 25, 47–57. Baumard, N. (2018).

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The Facebook experimenters determined that social messaging was an effective means of tuning behavior at scale because it “directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behavior of millions of people,” and they concluded that “showing familiar faces to users can dramatically improve the effectiveness of a mobilization message.” The team calculated that the manipulated social messages sent 60,000 additional voters to the polls in the 2010 midterm elections, as well as another 280,000 who cast votes as a result of a “social contagion” effect, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. In their concluding remarks, the researchers asserted that “we show the importance of social influence for effecting behavior change… the results suggest that online messages might influence a variety of offline behaviors, and this has implications for our understanding of the role of online social media in society.…”6 The experiment succeeded by producing social cues that “suggested” or “primed” users in ways that tuned their real-world behavior toward a specific set of actions determined by the “experimenters.”

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Chong’s model could not explain where the leaders came from. They acted “autonomously” and got engaged without being sure of success or followers. Once a start had been made with the acquisition of the first followers but prior to any tangible results, momentum developed as a result of a form of social contagion. This led to the conclusion, which might have been reached by more straightforward historical observation, that “strong organizations and effective leadership” combined with “symbolic and substantive concessions” from the authorities. In addition, it was wise to be cautious about being able to identify any “combination of objective factors in a society that will predictably set off a chain of events leading up to a collective movement.”25 The problem was not that the methods used in rational choice could not lead to intriguing and significant insights but that so many really interesting questions were begged.