Change

How do you change someone's mind? How do you stop bad habits? A bold new theory about the way ideas and behaviours spread (and can be altered) from the world's leading expert, Professor Damon Centola

This is a book about how change happens - how ideas spread successfully, and why sometimes they fail. We are living in a world of strong opinions that feels more divided every day. Why is that? Much of what we know about how ideas spread comes from bestselling books like Blink and Nudge who paint a compelling picture of a world, in which "influencers" are king, "sticky" ideas "go viral," and good behavior is "nudged" forward. The problem is that the world that Malcolm Gladwell or Richard Thaler describe is a world where information spreads, but beliefs and behaviours stay the same, one of simple contagions, which spread quickly to everyone, but do not have any lasting impact on what we think or how we live. This mythbusting book shows that change doesn't spread like a simple virus. Stickiness isn't everything. Influencers aren't the key. And Gladwell's "law of the few" from The Tipping Point is fully debunked. It is full of great case studies such as: Why Twitter took off, whilst Google has failed to create a social media platform of its own, despite multiple attempts. How Lord Kitchener recruited 2 million volunteers for the British Army at the start of the 1st World War And how and why huge social movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter took off when they did And, like the best smart thinking - it is written by the most qualified academic in the field: Damon Centola is director of Network Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania (and has previously taught at MIT and Harvard). And this book is based on on 20 years of his groundbreaking research.

Compelling

Préface
How do you change someone's mind? How do you stop bad habits? A bold new theory about the way ideas and behaviours spread (and can be altered) from the world's leading expert, Professor Damon Centola

Auteur

Professor Damon Centola is Director of the Network Dynamics Group at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously at Harvard and MIT. His work has been published across several disciplines in the world's leading journals, including Science, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behavior, The American Journal of Sociology, and Journal of Statistical Physics. His speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cigna, the Smithsonian, the American Heart Association, the National Academies, the U.S. Army and the NBA. Popular accounts of Damon's work have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, and Scientific American.

Résumé

'A remarkable and important guide to effecting change in our individual lives, businesses, societies - and beyond' JONAH BERGER, bestselling author of Contagious

How did movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter take off when they did?

How did Lord Kitchener recruit 2,000,000 volunteers at the start of World War I?

Why did Twitter take hold while Google+ has failed?

What surprising lessons can we learn from Covid 19?

From the spread of Covid-19 to the rise of political polarization, from implicit bias to genetically modified food, from NASA to Netflix - it's time to think differently about how change works.

Professor Damon Centola is the world expert in the new science of networks. His ground-breaking research across areas as disparate as voting, health, technology and finance has highlighted powerful and highly effective new ways to ensure lasting change. In this book, Centola distils over a decade of deep experience into a fascinating new theory that challenges previous assumptions that new ideas are either contagious or not.

Change shows that beliefs and behaviours are not transmitted from person to person in the simple way that a virus is. The real story of social change is more complex and much more interesting. When we are exposed to a new idea, our social networks guide our responses in striking and surprising ways. Drawing on deep-yet-accessible research and fascinating examples, Change presents a paradigm-shifting new science for understanding what drives change, recognising our blind spots and how we can change the world around us.