Hacking the system of social influence: How can we use the mechanics of influence to drive behavior for public good?
Social Influence is unavoidable and ubiquitous and it plays the most important role in people’s life in many aspects: from political attitude toward presidential election to choice of what cereal brands you choose to buy in the supermarket. When people think of social influence, the first figure that they come up probably is their favorite movie stars, singers or basketball players. However, most people usually don’t acknowledge the fact that friends, family or even strangers around them have a bigger impact on their everyday decision making process. Measuring the social influence has become a seemingly unsolvable problem since the big boom in technology adoption expands our social networks so rapidly. Google measures the influence according to the number of nominations or inbound links received while yahoo calculates data of not only the users’ networks but also their friends’. Facebook optimizes the process by focusing on the local level of a user’s personal network. The basic idea behind this method is to identify a group of people who influence their peers by the rate of their post being shared by their friends.
Sinan Aral (2013) on the effects of social influence vs. homophily. Published in Harvard Business Review.
As we have mentioned before that our behavior is more influenced by our peers than people who have a big microphone like Kayne West. And this is the reason why the study of networks is so important to our understanding of people’s behavior.
Examples of three different network positions in a social network: individuals bridging several clusters (A), individuals in dense clusters (B) and individuals in peripheral positions (C).
However the person who has most connections do not necessarily play the leading role in influencing others. Highly connected individuals are more unlikely to change, whereas loosely connected individuals on the margins are more likely to change.
“Also according to what we learned about the social network theory of triadic closure, new behaviors can spread from person to person and evolve into a cascade, resulting in large-scale social change. “ Once we understand how social networks work, we can potentially leverage the dynamics of social impacts to drive bigger social change. And studying about networks is really important and useful.