Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-The Lessons from a New Science Author: Alex Pentland | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DMCUYRM | Format: PDF
Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-The Lessons from a New Science Description
From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour ofthe new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We’re social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action—and most basic notions of common sense—are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about
idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors.
Thanks to the millions of digital bread crumbs people leave behind via smartphones, GPS devices, and the Internet, the amount of new information we have about human activity is truly profound. Until now, sociologists have depended on limited data sets and surveys that tell us how people
say they think and behave, rather than what they actually
do. As a result, we’ve been stuck with the same stale social structures—classes, markets—and a focus on individual actors, data snapshots, and steady states. Pentland shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic self-interest.
Pentland and his teams have found that they can study
patterns of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual
content of the information and predict with stunning accuracy how productive and effective that network is, whether it’s a business or an entire city. We can maximize a group’s collective intelligence to improve performance and use social incentives to create new organizations and guide them through disruptive change in a way that maximizes the good. At every level of interaction, from small groups to large cities, social networks can be tuned to increase exploration and engagement, thus vastly improving idea flow.
Social Physics will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work—and can be made to work better, at every level of society. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a generation, an entirely new way to look at life itself.
- File Size: 3810 KB
- Print Length: 321 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594205655
- Publisher: The Penguin Press (January 30, 2014)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DMCUYRM
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,221 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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- #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences - #36
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences - #47
in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences
Using specially instrumented "sociometric badges" (details provided in the book) and cell phone apps to monitor communication exchanges among their research subjects, the author and his collaborators sought to identify patterns and rates of "idea flows" in social networks, as well as relationships between characteristics of those communication exchanges (e.g., participation rates, frequency of conversational turn taking, etc.) and various types of behavioral and performance outcomes.
Some of their more interesting claims and / or findings are:
(1) We are more frequently and more easily influenced by our peers than we may think
(2) Because of (1), peer pressure, social incentive, or build-up of social capital can be more effective at eliciting cooperation and behavioral changes than offering financial or economic incentives to an individual
(3) Freer and more diverse flows of ideas through higher rates of give-and-takes can elevate group performances
(4) Sometimes the group performance enhancements can be obtained through simple means that enable social exploration, engagement, and learning to occur
(5) Enabling higher-quality social exploration, engagement and learning opportunities to become more readily available to everyone could mean the difference between economic and societal resilience or stagnation.
Pointing out how his research methodologies improve upon those employed in earlier or related studies, the author offers a new theory on what motivates human behavior and how it is different from and better than current ones.
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