Hidden Brain - The Snowball Effect

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

Why do some companies become household names, while others flame out? How do certain memes go viral? And why do some social movements take off and spread, while others fizzle? Today on the show, we revisit a favorite 2021 conversation with sociologist Damon Centola, who studies social contagion and how it can be harnessed to build a better world.Think back to the last time you tried to win an argument. What could you have done to bolster your case? Our recent episode "Less is More" has helpful strategies — you can find it here or in your podcast feed. And if you like our work, please consider supporting it. Thanks! 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Back in 2011, a 13-year-old girl posted a music video on YouTube. It sat there for about a month without getting much notice. But then, something totally unexpected happened. The girl's name was Rebecca Black, and the song she was singing in the video was called Friday. More and more people started watching it, leaving comments and sharing it. The song went viral.

Friday became the most watched YouTube video of 2011 with 167 million views. Plenty of people watched the video to make fun of it, perhaps not knowing or caring that Rebecca Black was only 13 years old. But a decade later, she's gotten the last laugh with the new remix of the song. That version, it's also gone viral, with millions of views in the first few days after it's released. This week on Hidden Brain, what makes certain songs, memes, and even social movements go viral? We look at why they spread and how social contagion can be harnessed to build a better world.

How is it some social movements take off and spread, while others find themselves stuck? Why do some companies soar and become household names while others flame out? Can you predict success and failure? Or is it all a matter of luck? These are questions that have long fascinated Damon Centola. He's a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book, Change. Damon Centola, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me.

I want to start with one model of how something can spread very, very rapidly. In late 2019, Damon, a few people got infected with the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, the Chinese city. Painted picture for me of how a virus can go from infecting a small number of people in one Chinese city to a global pandemic. Yeah, the way that virus is typically spread is through social contact. So that means that a few people in Wuhan will infect their friends and neighbors, the people they interact with directly.

But it also means that if any one of those people gets onto an airplane and travels, say, to Tel Aviv or to Berlin, then that infected person can infect the people around them on the airplane just by mere proximity. And then obviously those people when they get off the plane will infect their friends and neighbors and so forth. And if those people get on an airplane,

then of course they spread to a new part of the world. And so when we think about how this spreading process grows and how it spreads from one town to the globe, we really can imagine it as a series of firework explosions where one infected community basically infects everyone that they come in contact with. And then all of those people becomes for the center of their own fireworks explosions.

And what you get is this cascading series of fireworks that very quickly through rapid communication and transportation networks spread around the world. So what if your central contentions is that the way people are connected to each other, their social networks, influence how things spread or how they fail to spread. But let's just drill down our second deeper. Let's look at the social networks that allow a virus to spread exponentially.

Let's say I'm at an airport, you're at an airport, we're sitting next to each other at a gate waiting for our flights, we don't know each other, we don't talk to one another, but this chance meeting allows a virus to leap between us. So for this network, transmitting the virus requires very brief contact between us, almost like a glancing connection, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. And in many ways, we think about other kinds of contagions that way too. When we think about the spread of information, if you're sitting next to me at an airport

and you tell me about a great new NPR show or a great new app that I can download, that I may do that and I can tell someone else that once I get home, and that's exactly how diseases spread as well. And so we can think about this epidemiological model, the spread of diseases as a metaphor or as an underlying guide for thinking about all kinds of spreading processes and how just simple contact with a stranger can transmit really anything around the world. So, it's very appealing to think that most things spread like viruses. You know, so you have the example of the COVID-19 virus or a song like Friday and it's easy

to think that maybe everything spreads this way. Can you talk for a moment about how this fairly simple model of how things spread? How that model in some ways has, you know, if you will, gone viral? So the notion of influencers, which are highly connected people that we're all familiar with on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. And we tend to think of these influencers as the key to spreading any kind of innovation idea or social change process.

And that comes from viral thinking because if one person who interacts with a lot of other people gets COVID-19, then that person is gonna be a super spreader for the virus. So this idea that a highly connected person can be very effective for spreading something to lots of other people and therefore kind of set off an epidemic all by themselves, is an intuition that sits underneath viral marketing campaigns and the whole sort of

influencer marketing approach. And so for nearly a century actually, the assumption has been that everything spreads just like a virus does. Yeah, and I feel like you hear this narrative very often in the news. You cite the example of Oprah Winfrey sharing word in April 2009 about a new social media platform called Twitter. Listen to the state about that moment. Hi, it's Friday Live and I'm on Twitter for the first time. City next to me is Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter.

Can you believe all this tweedly-d stuff going on? Hi. How did it come to life? How did it come to life? So, Damon, what is the conventional story of how Oprah's first tweet produced exponential growth of the Twitter platform? It's exactly what you would imagine,

which is Twitter wasn't growing very fast. And then what we see in the timeline after and around Oprah's adoption of Twitter is that Twitter has by, I think, the end of that month, 28 million users. And so the natural thing to do or the intuitive justification or rationale for what we see happening is to say, oh, that company was successful know, that company was successful in getting, you know, a high profile influencer to endorse their product, and as a result, their product was then adopted by a lot of people. So I want to spend a moment defining a couple of terms that are going to come up repeatedly in the conversation.

Let's return to that moment in the airport. Sociologists call the connection that you and I had at the gate, a weak tie. What are weak ties, Damon? And can you give me some other examples of weak ties? Sure. I should mention that the term weak ties and that's complement strong tie come from the sociologist Mark Granoveter, who is personally one of my intellectual heroes. He defined these terms back in 1973.

Now the glancing contact that happens in the airport, Grant have had referred to as a weektie because if you and I are sitting next to each other in an airport we're not likely to know each other's friends or family we're not likely to even ever meet again. But that connection can act as an important in some senses like vital transmission point for a piece of information from your community to my community. And so what Mark did that was so interesting is notice that these week ties that don't play a huge role in how we conceptualize or think about our social networks are largely invisible, but nevertheless,

they're playing this important role for the transmission of ideas and information and diseases, of course, from communities, community, and across nations and ultimately across the world. So Mark Ranoveder's influential paper was called The Strength of Weekties. And besides being a very catchy title, it was about this very important idea that weekties in some ways can spur things

to travel very quickly and spread very fast. Can you give me some examples of the strength of weekties in everyday life? Yeah, Mark's actually an initial example was looking at how people find out about jobs. And of course when you're looking for a job and you're an employee, you talk to your friends, you talk to your family, you sort of try to source out what available options there are in what you think of as your network. But often time, everyone in your community knows about the same openings because everyone

in your community has the same friends and they know the same people. And so it's very hard to learn about a new job opening or a new opportunity from the people that you already know. And so what Mark realized was that when people learn about new opportunities, it's often from these glancing contacts where you're just talking casually in the airport. Someone mentions, oh, I think that this division at Microsoft is hiring. Or I heard that actually there's a new Amazon's opening up a new branch in this area, and that might be interesting to you, that your friends and family might not know about,

but that is, of course, incredibly relevant for you doing a job search. And so these weak ties are incredibly effective, and you can think of that as efficient for information transmission. You know, as new information comes up, it's very easy for that to spread across these sort of casual contexts. that as efficient for information transmission, as new information comes up, it's very easy for that to spread across these sort of casual contacts. You started to see evidence that this model of how things spread can have serious problems.

And I want to point to a couple of moments of insight that you say that you had. You grew up in a Quaker community where you were part of a lot of marches for social justice, but you noticed that your classmates at school didn't always care about the same issues. How did they speak to the ability or the inability of weak ties to spread ideas?

Yeah, well what I noticed was that across different groups or communities, it wasn't just they didn't care about them, they just didn't even know about them, there wasn't like engagement, and if someone were to talk about an issue like what are conservation or like fair gender practices in the workplace, at least in my middle school, it wasn't something that people understood. And so you could announce that there's some march or rally or you could talk about the importance of these issues, but it would largely fall on deaf ears, because the community of classmates and the way that people talked about topics didn't really engage

with or understand those ideas. If everything spreads like a virus, how is it some ideas don't leap from group to group? Damon was exposed to ideas about social justice at home, so why didn't they leap through him to his classmates? Why didn't he, if you will, infect them with those concepts? Damon also noticed something else. Over time, some ideas that were popular in one community did spread to others. But the way this happened did not look anything like a virus. Sometimes it took decades for those ideas to spread. Take, for example, the support for renewable energy or gay rights.

I noticed that some of those ideas actually had caught on, by the time I started college, a lot of people in the mainstream were talking about some of these issues in a sort of a regular everyday way. There were normal topics to think about. One of the issues in a sort of a regular everyday way. There were normal topics to think about. One of the most striking examples was like the organic foods movement, which was a very marginal sort of fringe idea in the early 1980s that you would go to a grocery store

and only buy organic whole grain foods and have to go to a bulk bin to get it. And a decade later, it was normal for grocery stores to have an aisle that was reserved for what they called health food. And of course, whole foods came along. And so, the influence of these peripheral movements on the mainstream was surprisingly effective for some things, but never landed for others. Right? Movements like water conservation, which was also a big one among some of the activists that

I knew growing up, never really caught on in the mainstream. The US and still hasn't. And so, the question that was raised for me, which I think is the really important question, is why? You know, is it just random or is there some underlying sort of scientific explanation for the success of some movements in the failure of others? The Negro passengers on the city bus lines of Montgomery have been humiliated, intimidated, face threats on this bus line.

As a young scholar, you started to examine the growth and success of the civil rights movement, and you started to see problems with the conventional story of viral spread of how that movement took off. Can you describe that insight to me using the examples of Rosa Parks and a woman named Claudette COVID? Yeah, the civil rights movement became one of the most interesting areas for me to study because of how the story is told that with the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. And she was arrested. And in many senses, this becomes a kind of galvanizing moment for the civil rights movement.

Just the other day, one of the fine citizens of our community, Mrs. Rosa Parks, was arrested because she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. And so the story that's told, which is analogous in many ways to kind of the sort of story of Twitter growing because of its moment on Oprah, the story that's told is there's one person stands up and then a movement follows and then the whole system of racial segregation collapses. But the truth of it is that lots you know, lots and lots of women stood up

intentionally against racial segregation on public buses. Claudette Colvin is one of them, but there are dozens of others of women who, you know, took a stand against that racial injustice, but they were arrested and nothing much came of it. It is a repeat I told him, I paid my fair and it's my constitution right to see here. Claudette Colvin was 15 years old when she was arrested and dragged off a bus in handcuffs in Montgomery, Alabama. This happened nine months before Rosa Parks did exactly the same thing.

When the news reporters asked me why didn't I get up, I said history had me glue to the seat. I said, felt as though, how are you talking to me hand, but pushing me down on one shoulder and so jr. Truth hand, but pushing me down on another shoulder. When we come back, how social networks explain the difference between the impact of Rosa Parks and the impact of Claudette Colvin. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Damon Santola is a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies how change unfolds within communities, within companies, within countries. He argues that the conventional models we have about virality don't describe why one social movement takes off while it's second stalls. Damon, you draw a very important distinction in your book between what you call simple contagion and complex contagion. What do you mean by those terms? Well, if we think of social change as a contagion process, some people accept an idea and then the people they come in contact with are accepted and so forth, it's natural to think of that

in a viral way, spreading just like a virus would. And that is really the notion of simple contagion, which is just about everyone that and infected or activated or excited person comes in contact with also becomes excited and activated. I'm here to join the people bringing attention to Lou Gehrig's disease by taking the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. And so that's how a meme spreads, or that's how I sort of contagious news story spreads from person to person.

And when we think about simple contagions, what we're really talking about is ideas that are familiar, products that we already really know, things that make sense to us intuitively. And so when we see a new one, it's not a lot of work, emotionally or cognitively, or any other way to just adopt it and pass it on. It just seems normal. Notice lots of ice. Don't cheese out.

Complex contagions by contrast are the kinds of social change initiatives or the kinds of ideas or the kinds of products that we resist initially that aren't familiar that are weird or a little bit different. Just coming into contact with one person who's advocating for it or who has adopted it isn't enough to convince us that we should do it too. we should do it too. A great example of this is something like, you know, joining a protest march, where you might join a protest march because it's a good idea and you're on board with the movement. But if you have no idea about the movement,

you're not oriented to it at all, you don't really care about it. And if there's the possibility of being arrested or the possibility of police retaliation, there's some risk involved with that choice. And so just because someone you know is doing it doesn't mean you're going to be convinced that you should do it too. And this is the sort of the big difference between a simple contagion

and a complex contagion. For a simple contagion to spread, all it takes is contact with one person. You're just basically finding out about it. You found out about the new meme, and you can watch it and spread it. But for a complex contagion, you need to be convinced. One of the hallmarks of complex contagions is they require people to accept certain costs. If you want people to change their behavior in some important way, you want them to recycle more or drive more slowly or practice safe sex, these changes can involve personal

costs. They're not like sharing a video of someone doing the ice bucket challenge or passing on the Friday song, which has almost zero costs. Why would it be that the social networks that prompt people to share cat videos are different from the social networks that can get someone out on the street to protest racial injustice. To explain, Damon Sites an example from 2013, where the Human Rights Campaign launched an initiative on Facebook to build support for same-sex marriage. Because the Supreme Court was hearing this case about same-sex marriage. And the initiative was to have people change their profile photo to an equal

sign that was pink and red to show support for the movement. And then I started looking through my feet and I just couldn't believe it. It was literally just a red symbol over and over and over again. It was about 24 hours when we knew that we were really onto something that I had gone viral. Now this initiative spread to almost 3 million Facebook users in under a week. So that sounds like something that's viral. But some data scientists and physicists looked more closely at the data.

And what they saw was that the spreading of this social contagion, this sort of change initiative to support SAMHSAG's marriage, was a complex contagion, even though it spread really fast. And the signature of this complex contagion was that before people adopted it from one of their neighbors, they waited for more of their neighbors to adopt it. And if you think about your life on Facebook,

you're connected to lots of different people. You know, you may see your grandparents, you may be connected to your parents, your friends from college, your friends from high school, people you know from work, people from your neighborhood. And all of those people are, people from your neighborhood. And all of those people are sort of evaluating your behavior. So there's some sort of social risk on adopting something that's kind of controversial, or

may not be accepted by these people, or you may even run the risk of starting in a flame more, an argument on your social media site. And so what people did is they waited until two, three, four, five of their sort of context adopted. And then that gave them enough confidence that this new behavior was legitimate, and then people did is they waited until two, three, four, five of their sort of contacts adopted, and then that gave them enough confidence that this new behavior was legitimate and then they would adopt too. Now, that idea that you need social reinforcement

from several people to convince you to adopt something means that you need networks that create a kind of reinforcing pressure from peers. If we remember when we think about the spread of the coronavirus, it spread like a fireworks explosion. So one person adopted and infected lots of people, and then those people infected lots of other people that the first person may not know, and so on and so forth.

And so a fireworks explosion doesn't have a lot of redundancy in it. It's got a ton of reach, and so it can get across the world really fast. But it doesn't have a lot of that kind of social convincement from people adopting and kind of sharing one idea with each other and creating a lot of reinforcement for it. You've actually touched on several different ideas here that are really important that we

should actually unpack somewhat slowly, Damon. Okay. You know, the core of your book is a very important insight. The central reason people change their behavior in any important way is because they see the people around them changing their behavior. So psychologists sometimes call the social proof. I get on Facebook because other people are on Facebook. I march on the streets because I see other people like me marching on the streets.

If you apply that insight to the science of change, the real question to us might not be, how do I make this person change? But how can I show this person that the people around them are changing? Is that in some ways the goal of the person who's actually trying to drive this kind of complex contagion? Yeah, there are two goals. One is, of course, to have new adopters get excited about the idea. And one way to do that is to have several of their

peers in context adopt, which creates credibility for the idea, makes it seem more accepted by their friendship group, and can also generate emotional excitement about getting on board. But there's a second part, which is that if the idea is fairly contentious, people who adopt early on, if they see that no one else has adopted, may wind up giving it up. They may wind up saying, well, this is actually not a good thing for me to be a part of, because no one else is supporting it. And so having connections to existing adopters and to people who are showing support for an idea keeps people engaged and it sort of sustains membership in the idea.

So if you think about it, it's really more like a fishing net than a fireworks display. And so in a fishing net, you've got lots of triangles connecting these different neighborhoods and people, you know, no people, and they know their friends of friends and so forth. And that redundancy gives people confidence that the idea is worth wire that this new behavior is accepted and then allows them to coordinate with other new adopters to then convince other people to adopt and so on and so forth. So you ran an interesting experiment that sort of tested the power of redundancy in driving behavior. In some ways it sort of compared what happens in a network that is in the shape of fireworks where I'm talking to three people, those three people are talking to three other people and so on, versus a efficient next example where I'm connected in a network with other people and I'm constantly hearing from the same people in the network over and over again. You ran an experiment trying

to drive a health intervention looking at these two different kinds of social networks. What did you find about the relationship between redundancy and the effectiveness of actually getting people to change their behavior? Yeah, well when I did, I created a fireworks explosion network with about 150 people on it, and then a similar network with the same number of people, but everyone was connected into a phishing net. And everyone was given the opportunity to know that they would learn about a new health technology, and then I put the health technology with one person into each network, and then wanted to just see if which of those contacts would go sign up for that new health technology. With social network, would trigger behavioral change?

The one organized like a fireworks display where people are connected to others in an expanding chain, or the fishing net where people were connected in a closed loop. Damon found that although information spread more slowly in the network organized like a fishing net, more people in that network actually changed their behavior. Yeah, I think that although it took a little bit longer to reach around the network in terms of the informational signal. The actual growth of adoption spread much faster and much farther across these fishing

networks than across the fireworks network. Now I ran this same experiment six different times and I got the same result, which means you can draw a very powerful kind of conclusion, which is you can make a strong scientific claim that by structuring a communication network among a group of people which is you can make a strong scientific claim that by structuring a communication network among a group of people online, you can change people's likelihood of adopting a new behavior. So, just a step back and look at the big picture for a second. We started by talking about viruses and how viruses spread, and we showed that viruses

spread through this network of weak ties. People know each other slightly. They have these glancing contacts very quickly. Something can go from a city in China to all the way around the planet. And then we looked at this other kind of change, which involves much more difficult, you know, behavioral change, where people actually have to change their behavior or their attitudes or their norms in some important way. And in order to do this, they often need reinforcement, not just from one, but from multiple people who are connected to them more closely, sort of a network of strong ties. And you make the case that for complex contagion, which is actually the kind of change that

most of us are actually talking about when we talk about change, you actually need these strong ties rather than the network of weak ties. When you looked at something like the civil rights movement, did you find that people change their behavior through weak ties or through strong ties? Yeah, that was one of the most striking findings about the civil rights movement is that the evidence all works in favor of strong ties. And that was a revelation at the time because the theories had all said that social change

and in particular the civil rights movement would be explained by weak ties in social networks that would allow information about activities to spread far and wide. But it turned out that although the information spread far and wide actual participation didn't, participation spread through friends of friends who are clustered together who could provide

social reinforcement, who could reduce the risk of participation, and ultimately could generate a strong emotional contagion among new participants and grow a movement from a cluster in the periphery of the network to reach across the nation. Now all of this in some ways produces a puzzle dammit. If people want to see others change before they change, the reasonable question is, how does anything ever change? Because what gets the ball rolling? So some people might say, okay, that's where the celebrity or the influencer comes in.

That's where Oprah comes in. If a celebrity comes out in favor of something, others will follow. You call this a myth in many ways. Why are celebrities not very effective at sparking behavioral change? It might be effective at sparking awareness, but why are they not very effective at sparking this kind of complex contagion? Well, there are two things you need to think about when you're dealing with what we refer to as influencers. And one is that what makes influencers so effective for spreading simple contagions is they've got lots and lots of ties. But when it comes to complex contagious, again, ideas

that are unfamiliar or ideas that maybe go against existing norms, the social influencer is highly observed. A lot of people are paying attention to their behavior, which means they're fairly careful about deciding what they're going to do and not do. Someone doesn't become highly connected by ignoring their social ties, they become highly connected by paying a lot of attention to what people expect of them. And this is true in entertainment, it's also true in business. And so what that means is that when people are evaluating

which new ideas to take on, which new products to adopt, particularly products that are public, products that people talk about, they have to take into account how everyone around them is going to perceive that decision, which means that when it comes to complex contagions, all of the non-adoptors are actually forces against adoption. They're not just neutral. This is a crucial idea. Remember how we said the central goal in behavior change is to show people that those around them are changing? Turns out, the same thing goes for celebrities and influencers.

They wait to see what their fans think. It may be counterintuitive, but if they don't see those people changing, they are hesitant to go first. And so this makes highly connected influencers into, you know, in some cases, a kind of roadblock. And you see that most of the successful initiatives for social change, this includes novel technologies like Twitter and Facebook, but also includes social movements like Black Lives Matter, Arab Spring and the Civil Rights Movement, grew from clusters of people in the network periphery who kind of grew a critical mass, also they had enough support that they went up tipping the center

of the network and then it spread to everyone. But the origin story is always in the periphery not in the center. You can see the same thing in the rise of former President Donald Trump. When he first announced his candidacy for President back in 2015, most people in the Republican establishment laughed him off. Some media organizations declined to cover his campaign because they thought it was a joke. But Trump caught on with people in the periphery of the Republican party, and gradually his growing support from the margins overwhelmed the resistance of the establishment. The change did not start from the center and move out. It started from the outside and moved in.

Damon says the exact same thing happens outside the political sphere. Take the example of something we talked about earlier, the rise of Twitter. Yeah, the origin story of Twitter is quite interesting because it is a story of peripheral growth, but it's also a story surprisingly of neighborhood growth, which when you think about internet technologies and social media, it's almost a truism that they would spread in the ether and not be constrained at all by local neighborhood geography. But in fact, Twitter grew initially in the San Francisco Bay Area, just through sort of friends and neighbors

adopting from each other. And so that's sort of the strong tie, complex contagion story, but it gets more interesting. Because what ultimately happens is that there is an earthquake one day. And all of a sudden, it's not a big earthquake for the Bay Area, but still it's an earthquake.

And Twitter became very, very useful instantly because people could coordinate with one another to figure out where shocks and after shocks were hitting, what their expectations were for what to do, and where family members were and how they were handling it. And so the sort of network really kind of galvanized. And then what happened that's pretty striking, I think the most surprising is that Twitter,

once they caught hold in San Francisco, didn't jump to LA or Chicago or New York. It actually started to spread across the countryside of California. It started to spread kind of south to San Jose and sort of north to Marin and to sort of slowly east to other parts of the sort of Bay Area and surrounding communities. And what you saw was that like as Twitter grew, it was in spreading viral through networks online. It was spreading spatially through neighborhoods.

And then something really unexpected happened, which is that as it filled out around the Bay Area, then Twitter showed up, again, not in New York or LA, but it showed up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And that's where it sort of next took hold. And the reason is because a lot of people who live in San Francisco and Cambridge went to school together. They went to college, they studied technology, and they work in these different sectors, either along Route 28, 128 in Boston, which is a major technology area, or along, you know, in Silicon Valley. And so these two areas wind up being like highly connected socially with lots of reinforcing ties across them, and essentially form a network that's

like a fishing net going from one part of the country across them. And essentially form a network that's like a fishing net going from one part of the country to another. And then once it landed in Cambridge, it spread out again, locally in Boston, around the Boston area. And then when it sort of amplified and took off and jumped from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Seattle,

which is another high tech hub, or people were connected to the people and so forth, and sort of gained traction in more and more cities, then ultimately it reached a tipping point around January 2009. And once it hit that tipping point, it just took off with hyper-extrapenational growth month after month. It went from 8 million to 20 million to 28 million very, very quickly. And that's the point at which Oprah adopted was during that period of massive growth. And even after that period, it continued to grow, but didn't grow as fast. That was the window for Twitter's major explosion. So Oprah is at the tail end of that process, not at the beginning. It's almost as if to get the celebrity endorsed,

the celebrity endorsed us coming on board, not in order to spur the avalanche, but because the avalanche is actually already gathered momentum. in some ways the celebrity influencer is very often surfing the avalanche that's already formed, not the one who's actually generating it. That's what I'm hearing from you. Yeah, and I think that's an important way to think about social change more generally. It makes sense that someone at the center of the network with lots and lots of connections and lots of reputational skin in the game, right? High stakes for the reputation is going to wait until something gains enough traction in the periphery of the network that there's a substantial critical mass that convinces them that this is actually a real thing that they should invest in as

well. And so that it makes sense that the costs for someone who's highly connected are higher in some way, so they wait longer, whereas the people in the periphery are sort of more easily excited and engaged by these sorts of ideas that are, you know, contentious or novel or different. And it's one of the reasons why social change almost always originates in the periphery of the network. How does this idea that change starts at the periphery apply to the rise of one of the largest social movements in recent years? Black Lives Matter. In 2020, the movement spread rapidly after George Floyd was pinned down and killed by Minneapolis police. The street has been breaking out in Philadelphia,

Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Oakland, California. As outraged spreads over the killing of George Floyd and the U.S., protesters have taken to the streets around the world. In Brazil, demonstrators have been raising their voices against the killing of black people mainly in poor neighborhoods. Demonstrations are continuing this weekend with protests held in East Asia and large crowds expected in European cities. I think the tragic death of George Floyd is one of the moments that I think our generation

will never forget. But what's interesting and I think what's most important for understanding Black Lives Matter is that people often explain that process by saying, well, there was a viral video of a white police officer killing George Floyd and that's what set off this sort of public outrage. But Damon reminds us that six years earlier, another video, every bit is disturbing, also made headlines. It showed the death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old black man, at the hands of a white police officer

in New York City. When that video became public, thousands of people expressed their outrage on social media. And the term Black Lives Matter that hashtag was used about 600 times, but no major social change, and certainly nothing on a global scale emerged. The real change for Black Lives Matter when it became a movement that galvanized not just the nation, but also the world, was in August 2014. Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. On the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, outrage and anger.

Protesters of different ages and races demanding answers in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of a policeman. And the important thing to understand about what happened to make Black Lives Matter such a powerful movement is that the networks of people talking about this topic were really quite disconnected prior to Ferguson. There were communities of Black activists, there were communities of white liberals, communities

of Black youth, communities of celebrities, communities of international media and white US media. And all of them were talking about these topics, communities of, you know, international media and white US media. And all of them were talking about these topics, but internally, basically a series of different bubbles. And then what wound up happening over the course of the several days or the week that, you know, the protest erupted in Ferguson is that the people who really got involved in social media and who really took over the conversation were regular citizens, just college student in the street.

Just this for you and me, just this for my proud. Posting notifications about what was happening in the police escalation and other citizens chiming in, talking about ways in which we could interpret, you know, the news that was reporting on this because at the beginning, the conversation that was happening on social media through a news site, like CNN, referred to the initial protests as, you know, a mob that was protesting the alleged shooting of a man. And immediately, just members of the community, regular people started responding to these tweets and engaging directly with mainstream media, saying, why mob? Why not, you know, citizens? or why not, you know, community members,

and he had just graduated from high school, you know, he wasn't a man, and the alleged shooting was an actual shooting. And so this conversation had never really taken place before, and as media showed up and started engaging online, something really interesting happened in Ferguson, which is that activist groups started interacting directly with, you know, mainstream white media, and then black youth who weren't really engaged happened in Ferguson, which is that activist groups started interacting directly with mainstream

white media. And then black youth, who weren't really engaged in these activist conversations, started becoming engaged as well, along with the regular citizens who were on the street in Ferguson and other citizens from around the country. And so what wound up happening was that these bridges between these different social groups became wider. The relationships became thicker and people started to kind of influence each other. And one of the early victories

that didn't get a lot of attention at the time, but it was really important for the growth of Black Lives Matter was that by the end of that first week, mainstream media was reporting on those protests differently. They were referring to Michael Brown as someone who just graduated high school. They were talking about it as a shooting and they were talking about it as community members

and citizens protesting rather than a mob. At the prosecutor's office, about 150 people called for justice for Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old killed by police. And so all of a sudden hashtag Black Lives Matter, which had only been used 600 times prior to Ferguson, was used over a million times. And it really sort of ballooned into something where all these different communities were coordinated on a way of talking and a way of thinking, but identified police violence and civil owned fractions as something that united all these different deaths.

All of a sudden, New York City had something specific in common with Ferguson Missouri. And then in the months after that, others, Central Blond and Tamir Rice, those deaths, instead of being isolated incidents, became unified under a core message of the Black Lives Matter movement and everyone understood it that way. And this really changed the national conversation. All of a sudden, by 2019, the hashtag Black Lives Matter was used 17,000 times a day. It just became this sort of consistent way

that people across different groups were talking about it. And that actually set the stage for what happened in 2020. What do you think it is that when we hear about these incidents and we look at the Black Lives Matter movement, or we hear about the Rosa Park story and we see the civil rights movement. What do you think prompts us to want the simple story that basically says, you know, Rosa

Park's refused to give our proceed in the bus and that triggered the civil rights movement or George Floyd was killed and that triggered the Black Lives Matter movement. Instead of seeing the very complex social networks that had to be created in order in some ways for these flashpoints to have the effects that they did. The way of thinking that's familiar to us is thinking about spreading as a viral process or as an epidemic process, largely because we understand it so well.

There's been just a century of science explaining how contagion happens and explaining what we can expect as a flu spreads around the world. And so we use those as metaphors for interpreting things that we don't understand. And I think that's entirely reasonable. One of the exciting things about the science of sociology is that it's really only in the last two decades

that we've been able to do experiments or analyze large-scale data in real time. And that's what social media has given us is a way of sort of observing these processes in real time and And that's what social media is given us is a way of sort of observing these processes in real time and to see how they unfold and really show that the same kinds of theories that we can use to develop new models and new policies are the same kinds of theories that really explain changes in the world around us like Black Lives Matter. The idea that a group of people on the periphery can change entire societies is powerful.

It's like the image of a rolling snowball that eventually produces an avalanche. So how many people do you initially need to get that snowball rolling? How small can that committed minority be to drive change? The answer will surprise you. That's after the break. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. It happens all the time.

A company, an idea, or a social movement comes out of seemingly nowhere and becomes wildly popular. Sometimes even the people with the idea don't fully understand what happened. They have been laboring for decades in obscurity before suddenly striking it big. Sociologist Damon Santola has explored how such revolutions unfold. In his book, Change, he offers a roadmap for policymakers, entrepreneurs, and change agents on how to deploy social networks to bring about change.

They mean we've looked at different models of how things spread at a very simple level of virus can spread through a network of casual acquaintances, what sociologists might call weak ties. Some ideas spread because a celebrity makes an announcement, but merely getting information to spread far and wide does not always translate to action. If changing behavior is your goal, it often makes more sense to generate change in small groups on the periphery and slowly get the movement to expand from there. You've run experiments where

you test whether a committed small minority can change the behavior of people in a group. Do you find that they can and how small can this committed minority be to actually have an impact? Instead of we ran examin different sizes of committed minorities or groups who would try to advance a social change and we looked at groups from 17% through 25% up to 30% to see what fraction of a population would be required to change everyone else's mind. And what we found was a really clear cutoff at 25%. Pretty much every group below 25%, whether that was 17% or 20% or 21%, had almost no

impact on the behavior of the rest of the group. But as soon as the committed minority or the activist reached 25%, everyone else in the group changed their behavior to do with the committed minority was doing. And this worked, of course, for 28% and for 29% and for 30%. And so this provides kind of a really clear cutoff point when we can say even though a group that was at 22% seems hopeless, it seems like they're not making much impact, which is a little bit more support they can actually have an enormous impact on whatever else is doing. So the fascinating thing is when we think about

these tipping points, it might actually explain why it is a movement might be struggling in obscurity for a long time, and then it reaches this tipping point and suddenly something changes and something that seemed impossible seems like it's inevitable. Yeah, it really answers the puzzle, why is social change so abrupt? Because it seems intuitive to think, well, you know, something gains traction

and it should sort of increase incrementally. So it'll get more and more and more popular and then eventually it won't be doing it. But we don't really see that with social change. We see basically that there's a hidden process that most people are not aware of. There's a fringe movement, there's an activist group that seems not to be having much impact. And then almost all of a sudden, everyone sort of takes this idea seriously. In 2014, people were pulled about their opinions, and they didn't support the protest.

And they thought that there was really no problem of policing in black communities. And then after George Floyd in 2020, the vast majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, said that they thought that the black guys matter protests were justified, and there was a problem with policing in black communities. And that's an enormous change

in sort of public opinion, public consciousness in just six years. You can see many other examples around the world of the power of social networks. In one study, the research on Laurie Beaman analyzed an intervention in the African country of Malawi. The government wanted to spread use of a new farming technique. The research has found the most effective way to spread the idea was to concentrate persuasion

efforts on a small number of villages and get the idea to take hold. As those areas began to see success, other villages started to copy them and the change spread organically. We could easily capitalize on this insight for all kinds of change. If I'm a city government and I want to get more people to install solar panels on their roofs, I might be tempted to say, alright, I have a grant that can give out solar panels to 300 houses, I'm going to spread my money as widely as possible. The better strategy, however, might be to concentrate my panels on houses on a few streets.

The goal is to get neighbors to see what's happening and want to get solar panels of their own. Yeah, I think that one of the most striking of results about solar panel adoption is that it's so incredibly localized. It's really a neighborhood effect. And governments, particularly in Europe, have done an excellent job of incentivizing people to adopt solar panels and incentivizing companies to build solar panels and make them available.

But they found that that wasn't sufficient to actually generate a tipping point or a change in the norms. In some sense, that's the crucial issue with tipping points. Everyone's waiting for everyone else to go first. So one thing that the German government did that was so clever is they started targeting neighborhoods and installing incentivizing homeowners to just install within certain neighborhoods solar panels on their homes. And this shifted the social norms within those communities and

created kind of a social pressure on the neighbors to realize that this was actually normal in their community now. And then they voluntarily went and adopted solar panels. And the most remarkable part about this process is that it spilled over from community to community and neighborhood to neighborhood and wound up becoming the dominant social norm throughout Germany that everyone was expected to have these solar panels on their homes. And we've seen similar effects in Britain, similar effects in Japan, even in certain neighborhoods in California and Connecticut.

And so the sort of neighborhood effects in terms of homeowners expectations about what they shouldn't be doing are very powerful and actually impact at a national scale adoption of something like solar panels. Now even as there are people who don't understand these lessons about what drive change, there are others who seem to understand these lessons very well. Some authoritarian regimes are cleverly using these ideas not to support change, but to suppress change. Can you tell me about China's 50 cent party? Yeah, and I think this is one of the sort of more important things about social science. Sociologies now approaching this point where we can understand with enough

rigor and insight what governs these kinds of change processes that we also have to worry about what the implications are for governments who might use these ideas. And China has done exactly that. They've done something that is clever but also destructive, which is when people on social media in China, whenever an uprising takes place, so our protest event takes place, you would think that the government would use social media in China, whenever an uprising takes place or a protest event takes place, you would think that the government would use social media to promote its own sort of fake news or false information about what was actually happening. But instead they devised an incredibly different strategy, which was essentially strategic

non-sequitors. So they would have agents who were masquerading as real people as members of the social media community. And as people started talking about a protest event or about some sort of problem with So they would have agents who were masquerading as real people as members of the social media community. And as people started talking about a protest event or about some sort of problem with the government or its policy, these social media agents, which were called the 50 cent party because they were paid 50 cents in Chinese Joe, they started talking about a local parade or they would start talking about some principle of communist doctrine.

And the idea was if you have enough of these people talking to each other, it basically creates a critical mass where the other people talking about legitimate protest issues or legitimate grievances feel like their conversation isn't relevant anymore, which relevant is this celebration of a local parade or a fireworks display. And so it winds up changing the expectations of what we

can and can't talk about on social media just by virtue of creating a critical mass of people who are doing something different than other people were doing. And it's been incredibly effective for derailing activists efforts on Chinese social media. It's sort of a remarkable way of actually suppressing descent without actually you know, burning books or basically actually censoring people in sort of the ways that totalitarian regimes used to do in the middle part of the 20th century. Yeah, the way I talk about it in the book is they're not so much censoring seditious books as much as flooding the market with the appeal of pulp fiction.

As I step back and I think about this broad work, Damon, to the extent that non-sociologists think about social networks, I think we tend to think of them as pipes. So these are sort of pipes that deliver us information. I get information from this set of people on Twitter. I get information from that set of people on Facebook. You're saying in many ways that that's the wrong way to think about the power of social networks. They're not pipes, but something else.

The pipe metaphor really comes from disease transmission, which is to say, if I sit next to you in an airport and you're infected with a coronavirus, now I get the coronavirus, there's nothing should have, you know, deep or interpersonal or meaningful about that process. It's really just a transmission. And when we think about that transmission process and we think about things like highly connected influence or it's just a person with lots and lots of pipes going out to other parts of society and they can spread whatever content to those people and so on and so forth. But when we look at things like the spread of news, it's not so simple. The networks through which people filter these ideas or new scientific information are actually doing a lot of work to determine how receptive you are to the information whether you believe it whether you rejected or whether you just interpret it very

differently than was originally intended. And so this is the way in which social networks act as prisms that refract in shape the beliefs that we hold by virtue of the people that we interact with. And so one of the things that we think about in terms of solving social problems is how we can shape the interactions people have or maybe structure them in ways that are more productive. think about, you know, in terms of, you know, solving social problems, is how we can shape the interactions people have or maybe structure them in ways that are more productive. One thing you can do is to take a centralized echo chamber and make the networks more egalitarian. But we've found is that this is unbelievably effective for changing the actual beliefs of people in a community. In fact, when you take similar groups of Democrats and Republicans

who are highly polarized on issues like immigration or climate change or gun control, and you let them interact within networks that are more like fishing nets. Opinions and ideas from the periphery of those communities can actually gain traction and be reinforced. And what winds up happening is that both communities independently move toward each other, and you wind up generating a kind of reconciliation of ideas,

just by virtue of the fact that good ideas are often in the periphery of the social network, but they wouldn't have been able to catch on or have any influence when they were being blocked by a highly powerful central influencer. Daemon Centella is the author of Change, a book about social movements and entrepreneurial success. He's a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Daemon, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, it's my pleasure. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Brigitte McCarthy, Laura Quarelle, Kristen Wong, Ryan Katz,

Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our run song Hero Today is the Library Journal. It's a publication read by librarians around the United States. Some months ago, the Library Journal invited me to their annual conference to talk about my new book, Useful Delusions. One of my fellow panelists was Damon Centola.

I so enjoyed hearing about his ideas that I reached out to him shortly afterwards and asked him about coming on Hidden Brain. Librarians have a special place in our heart at Hidden Brain. Books are the lifeblood of our show. I'm grateful to the Library Journal for introducing me to Damon Centola's work, and for all the other work the organization does, to draw attention to writers and ideas.

For more Hidden Brain, sign up for our weekly newsletter where we explore ideas related to this week's show and share other links. Sign up at news.hiddenbrain.org. If you like today's show, please consider supporting us. Go to hiddenbrain.org and click on support. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.