Damon Centola | The Psychology of Making Big Things Happen and Ideas Spread

Srini Rao

 Damon, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Damon Centola

Thanks for having me.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure to have you here. I found out about your work because I stumbled upon your book, change how to make big things happen on Amazon. And at first it seemed like a very click baity title, but then when I read the book, I thought this is hands down. The most well documented explanation of how to build anything and make an idea spread that I've come across in 10 years. It was the best book I read last year, which is why I immediately reached out to you after reading it. Um, but before we get into that, given the nature of your background, uh, I

to ask you what social group were you part of in high school and what impact did that end up having on the choices that you've made with your life and your career?

Damon Centola

Yeah.

Damon Centola

Interesting. So I really started my kind of early life in an unusual way. I think that some of the other interviews out there might cover this, but I grew up in essentially what was like a commune setting. So it was a Quaker community that was found on these principles of like tolerance and interracial interdenominational communities. So that was an unusual upbringing, particularly in America in the 80s. And most people were like focused on Reagan and wealth.

And so I was privy to a lot of social change movements, movements around sustainable foods, movements around water conservation, and of course, for race and gender equity. And so I just kind of was absorbing that as a kid and also noticing over the years, when I became a teenager, that some of these movements had succeeded, had really gained kind of traction, and other ones hadn't, and are still struggling.

Water conservation is still not something that most Americans think about. But the same groups that were working on that, that also successfully pioneered the movement of whole foods into mainstream American consciousness, have been basically ineffective at changing people's conceptions of water and water usage. So what really entertained my thinking as a kid was, why are some of these movements really taking off and getting traction and why are others not? And is there any kind of theory or science behind this?

And I would say that I kind of balanced from group to group in high school. There were lots of sort of interesting things going on in each of these different groups, but what kept me kind of, I would say motivated socially in terms of my friends was people who were thinking about similar kinds of questions, maybe through their own lens and their own things they were thinking about. But I think the question of social change...

is something that particularly in the last like 50 years, it's been a big question in the American consciousness. Like how we see a lot of social change, we wonder about when it works and why it works. And growing up as I did after the civil rights movement, you've got these great historical examples. And then of course, living through like the fall of the Berlin Wall that raised kind of our awareness that big things can happen. And then the question is, well, why? Why didn't they happen earlier? Why did they happen then? And is there any kind of explanation? And I would say in many ways that's really

Damon Centola

framed my thinking as a scientist.

Srini Rao

Hmm. Well, growing up in a Quaker community, I mean, I only know the things I know about Quakers from just sort of media representations. What misperceptions do you think that people like me have just based on the media that I consume about the kind of upbringing you have, whether it's related to religion?

Damon Centola

Well, sorry, this is like, you know. Sorry, go ahead.

Srini Rao

whether it's related to religion or just the general social environment.

Damon Centola

Yeah, there are lots of different kinds of like, you know, when you say come and it means a lot of different things. And I traveled around in my early 20s and kind of visited a bunch of them and they're, some of them are pretty different and honestly a little scary. The thing about the one that I grew up in is that it was founded in the 1940s, actually in 1940, basically from people escaping the Holocaust. So it was a lot of German Jews and other people who were sort of sympathetic to the sort of plight of German Jews.

And so the principles there were like this idea that everyone would be sort of tolerant of, you know, different ideas, religions, beliefs, and so forth. And so it wasn't, it was Quaker in the sense that those were Quaker principles, but it wasn't Quaker in the sense that, you know, it required any kind of religious membership. So there are lots of non-Quakers living there. And so it was really kind of a, before multiculturalism was like a popular idea or

something that we talk about, which of course now it's something that's again made its way to the mainstream and very well accepted in the US. But the 1970s when I was, you know, we moved there, it was just a kind of a bit of an oasis in the midst of the rest of the country of people trying to sort of organize life in a way that would be coherent and consistent with capitalism, everyone had real jobs, they worked in the real world, but there was a kind of.

communal sensibility in terms of their accountability, the responsibility for the community, for doing work parties, helping out at the local soccer field, everyone sort of pitching in and also going to a weekly meeting and then to a monthly kind of meeting that would be very much like what you would think of as like Vermont town hall-ish, except with certain principles governing the rules and how people engage with each other. And I think that that,

in the suburbs, this was like outside of Philadelphia, it was just a very unusual kind of creation. I think it looks more like small town Europe or small town New England from generations bygone. But I think that what's interesting about it, particularly in the time when I was growing up, was that it was just really a matter of principle. It's like families, mostly people with young children decided to move there and raise their kids there as a way of providing them with a reference point for like what civic mindedness looks like. What...

Damon Centola

community belonging looks like, what activism looks like, and fundamentally what social responsibility looks like. And so, and I think that was in many ways the sort of guiding principle behind it. And I thought a lot in the years afterwards, when I went to go out to college and visited other places, you know, like these communes in New Mexico that were really, I mean, very spiritually focused, that they had gurus and things like this, that were very different from the way I grew up, which was like most people, you know,

had a job and this was like the homestead where everyone lived. It wasn't self-contained in any way. But I think that the misconception probably like from when I was like five, six, seven, eight years old and you go to middle school, you know, the misconception was probably that you have the Quaker Oats box and you have the guy on the Quaker Oats box and most people, you know, there's a kind of association of that with like Mormon. But again, the principle of the community wasn't to be committed to any specific religious doctrine. It was more that these principles of tolerance.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Well, I mean, you've talked about social responsibility, social change, and communal accountability, and how we've seen throughout history great social change. But that requires optimizing for collective interest instead of self-interest. And I think as a society, we've kind of gone in the other direction. How do we get back in the midst of sort of a very individualistic society where everybody has an online presence, which ironically is one of the reasons you and I are talking, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk

is basically to help people grow their online presence, because I just felt this was the science of how to do that. But at the same time, I think that there's this darker side in which we've maximized self-interest to a point of diminishing returns.

Damon Centola

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we've maximized self-interest. I think that it could be a whole lot worse than it is today. I think that the marketing around kind of the me generation and that the world according to sort of my own personal sense of fame and self-presentation, which has really caught on more in the generations after me than in my generation, the millennials and Gen Z.

is something that's interesting because it's served certain commercial goals for technology companies to promote that conception. Just in the same way that in the 80s, the I want my end TV was a popular slogan that fed into a certain conception of things I want, things I deserve, things that make me a whole human being. So I think these conceptions of self as the center of commercial and product-centered universe is something that

has been around for a little while, but I think that you're absolutely right. There's been a kind of an ebb and flow, to a degree to which like that's widely accepted. I would say that I actually feel like this generation now, the last 10 years, has been a little bit more socially active than the 10 years prior, and that I was extremely happy to see the sort of growth of Black Lives Matter, because a lot of people when they see those events,

say, and this is again just because of people sort of their social worlds they live in and their exposure to the sort of the kinds of news they consume and the kinds of conversations they have with friends and colleagues, but a lot of people see those events and the media postings around them and say oh my god there's this new problem of violence against you know inner city black youth and of course it's not at all a new problem it's a problem that's been around and far worse for decades.

What's happening is there's kind of increasing public awareness of it and increasing public consciousness of it that's for the first time integrated across different social groups. And this is one of the big theses in the book is when you see these kinds of movements grow in a way that's not just a niche group mobilizing around their own sort of self-interest, but a group that somehow spans communities and demographic boundaries that traditionally wouldn't...

Damon Centola

necessarily mobilize around an issue like this. Then you're seeing something very special happen with the social networks and essentially the collective consciousness. And so to make that more concrete, what you see with Black Lives Matters, initially it started this kind of marginal fringe movement, the 2012, 2013, 2014, the vast majority of Americans thought it was just a kind of basically a complaint by a group of people who were probably being treated fairly but didn't understand the sort of...

pressures that the police were under and things like this. And so they didn't support the movement. And at that point, the movement was relatively peaceful. It was just these small protests in city to city. And it really was after Ferguson and the sort of explosion of support for Black Lives Matter and the actual codification of the movement in the term Black Lives Matter, that then it sort of took on a national awareness and sort of attention from the White House and so forth. And then of course, with George Floyd in 2020, with the sort of national and then international protests.

And the question is, well, how is that possible that, you know, by in 2013, 2014, it's really just like, you know, Black inner city residents mobilizing around this issue that most of the rest of America thinks is a marginal issue. And then by 2020, it's only six years later. I mean, it's not a long time in the history of culture evolution. And only six years later, you have like white suburban housewives marching side by side with Black inner city youth to protest Black Lives Matter.

That's a significant change in the reach and the sort of conception of relevance of this movement to all these different populations. And what happens in that six-year window is a changing structure of the social networks on social media. And so what's interesting from that point of view is, sure, social media can be a commercial vehicle for celebrating the self and for making people feel as though their private desires are the most important thing in the world.

But it's also this phenomenal vehicle for establishing essentially shared communication networks across groups that hadn't been talking before and certainly not have talked about like such substantive issues. And one of the powerful things that happens in that space of communication networks across groups. And one of the concepts we can talk about today if we have time is this idea of like what that bridge across groups looks like. That winds up being like a key scientific factor for understanding when these kinds of movements are successful.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Damon Centola

The creation of these bridges, oh, no, let me just finish the thought and then I'm sorry. I'm really interested in your follow-up. I just wanted to say that one of the points is that what happens in that communication network when you have these effective bridges across groups is that the language that each group uses to describe their own concerns, winds up starting to correspond and ultimately coordinate across different groups and that's just a function of the interaction across them. All of a sudden you see

terms that before, like a couple years earlier, that one term would have been private to a certain group in its own interests, the term takes on a new sort of semantic value. And all of a sudden, different groups of people with different democratic backgrounds, different histories, different individual economic concerns are all using a kind of similar set of terms to mean things that are all personally valuable to them and their families. And that, you know, that kind of linguistic change, it can seem kind of, you know, it trivial or in some way like technical to study the evolution of language.

It turns out it's deeply meaningful because it's really how people talk about their lives. And when people start talking about their lives in these overlapping ways, then you can have a movement like Black Lives Matter that really somehow encompasses something that's intimate to people from all different walks of life.

Srini Rao

Wow. Well, one question before we get into the book, and this is something I always ask any educator. You know, you're at USC and, you know, we probably in the last couple of years seen a combination of a college admission scandal, rising tuition, and I wonder if you were tasked... Sorry. Oh, for some reason I thought... Okay, I apologize. We'll cut this.

Damon Centola

Oh, I'm so sorry, but I'm not at USC. Yeah. I'm at the Annenberg, I'm at the, I was gonna let that go until you started mentioning the scandals, no, I'm definitely not associated with that university. I'm at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Srini Rao

Okay.

Srini Rao

You know, for some reason I thought Annenberg was at USC, but totally...

Damon Centola

There, and that's not, that's not your fault. They're actually two Annenbergs. And it's because the, you know, Walter Annenberg, the founder of TV Guide and also the ambassador for the US, basically initiated these two schools, one on the West Coast, one on the East Coast. Yeah. Okay.

Srini Rao

Okay.

Srini Rao

Okay, I will, I... Okay, we'll cut all this out. Sorry about that. Josh, cut this out, please. Okay, well, you're still at an educational institute. Well, okay, so you're an educator at an elite educational institution.

And, you know, in the last few years, we've seen a lot of changes. I mean, I went to Berkeley as an undergrad. And, you know, the joke with me and my sister is if we had the grades we did in high school, there's no way in hell we'd get in now. If you were tasked based on the knowledge you have about social change with redesigning our education system to prepare students for the future, what would you change about it?

Damon Centola

Wow, what a big question. There's so many sides to that. There's, I would say first of all, there's the thing you just mentioned with regard to like admissions and the challenges of elite institutions and some of the pressures that now fall on high school students and also on parents. And then the second one probably is cost, right? The exclusiveness of these universities by virtue of how expensive they become. And I think the third one is the classroom itself.

and the question of, and this is something that's extremely timely, the question of intellectual and academic freedom, right, because there's a big issue regarding like what can be talked about in the classroom. And it's got some, it seems like, you know, straightforward, you know, American neoliberalism, like we think everything's safe in the classroom, the classroom is a place of free speech. It's not as simple as that, right? There are some topics that, and some views that...

you wouldn't necessarily want articulated as like equally valid in a classroom setting. And so the topic of how to improve the education system, I think, in particular at the university level involves all three, which is how to frame the expectations for students and what their goals are, how to think about cost and financing and making education in general, high quality education, less exclusive. And then third, like what is really the function of the university? How do we...

How do we maintain a free and protected intellectual debate that allows students and teachers to engage in subtle and difficult conversations about topics like histories of racism, histories of sexism, movements today, like the January 6th attack on the Capitol, in a way that's intellectually liberal in a broad sense of being able to interrogate all sides of the problem instead of just.

assuming as we all do that there are certain things that are just wrong and we just don't talk about them, that can sometimes stifle a productive intellectual discussion and also the fundamental process of learning beyond the immediate context. So these are, I think these are the three issues that are probably at stake in improving the educational system.

Srini Rao

Well, let's get into the book. I think that, like I said, to me, this was probably the psychology of how to actually build an audience or build a company or make any sort of idea spread in a way that I had never seen explained before in so much detail. And let's start with the myths that you talk about, the biggest one being the influencer myth, which I think is really relevant to a lot of people who are listening to this show, because I think every guest here would be considered, quote unquote, an influencer.

the thing that really struck me that you talked about was this idea that you say that the power of highly connected social stars, or as we now call them influencers, to spread innovations turns out to be one of the most enduring and misleading myths in social science. It has infiltrated the world of sales, marketing, publicity, and even politics so much so that even when an innovation spreads from the periphery to achieve worldwide influence, we still give credit for its success to a social star.

And the funny thing is there's probably not a person listening to this who doesn't, hasn't at one point or another thought, hey, you know, if I got to be on Oprah, I would be famous overnight and I'd sell a million books. Or if Gary Vaynerchuk shared my podcast with his audience, then I'd have a million subscribers tomorrow. One, where did, how did we arrive at that conclusion and why is it wrong?

Damon Centola

Well, so the idea of the influencer, it really started in the 1940s with some groundbreaking work by sociologists who are trying to figure out the role of media. So how effective are essentially commercials on radio or subsequently on television, getting people to buy products? So it's kind of a basic question. But then it actually connects to the deeper question of democracy because the same strategies of advertising products were also used to advertise candidates, right? So you have these radio broadcasts with candidate.

on speeches and also radio, you know, television commercials with candidates. And the question was, you know, is that actually affecting people's voting behavior? And what they found out was actually that there were people who were paying more attention to the news than other people, and those people were acting as like filters. And so they had this kind of model where like, okay, media commercials, you know, information from the world comes into the sort of social life of regular citizens, really by getting attention.

from one person who's a kind of social person who has a lot of connections and has a lot of attention. And that person then winds up being the source of distribution for that information through the network. And that was the original idea of what's called the opinion leader when now today in social media is called the influencer is that there's a small number of people who are more connected and more attentive. And those are the people that are basically filtering all the information in the world through their social networks. And then everything's just propagating.

So that was the big idea. And we've stuck with that for a long time because it really, it hooks into, and I think that, you know, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book in 2000 that kind of just amplified this intuition with some really nice pros. And a couple of, you know, nice examples that, you know, highlight cases where we can easily imagine someone who's, you know, highly visible making, you know, buying a product or using something that everyone else sees. And then they copy that. And that becomes a sort of a logic.

for diffusion and for influence. And the idea is that like that actually works pretty well for things like coconut water, right? So if a highly high profile person adopts that kind of trivial thing like that, or a piece of gossip. And the idea had been, well that actually is a really good description that actually maps onto our basic science of disease spreading too. Someone who's highly connected gets the measles and a lot of people wind up getting the measles from them.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Centola

So it's a kind of generalized intuition about how networks operate. It turns out that all of those ideas fail when we shift from looking at easy things like teeth whitening creams, to things that require some work in order to change our thinking or to change our behaviors. So like disruptive products or bold political initiatives, or today the movements for sustainability and for race and gender equity.

And what we really see is that in those cases, the influencers not only aren't very effective at initiating change, but if they try to do it before any other process has taken off, like they could be effective for spreading, like an example I gave them, like the teeth whitening cream. If they tried to spread some kind of bold political initiative that way, what would wind up happening is they would immediately lose their status as an influencer.

Because what's going on here is that all of the outgoing ties from an influencer for like spreading what I call a simple contagion, those are also incoming ties in the sense that they are being observed and evaluated and monitored by this vast audience. And so they can't just do whatever they want. In fact, most of what they do is tailored to the kind of biases and beliefs and sort of normal expectations of their community. And so if they wanna kind of shift those expectations,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Centola

it's not going to happen by them changing everyone at once. What has to happen is there's a different part of the social network, which is out in the periphery. It's much less observed. It's much less subject to that kind of like criticism and comment on a regular basis. But that's where a new idea and the periphery can take hold and start to get reinforced and start to gain traction. And so this is where really the big theory of tipping points helps us to understand that there are special locations in the network that are not obvious. They're kind of hidden out there in the corners.

But those are the locations where you can really effectively grow a tipping point for change, partially because they're less in the view of everyone else who's sort of doing all this censoring work to keep everyone in line with norms and expectations and kind of standard ways of thinking. And so while it makes sense that influencers are effective for a lot of things, those things typically don't involve a significant amount of change. When it comes to change, we're actually

of looking at regular people in these sort of network periphery locations, turns out to be a really consistent way of explaining when change occurs and also thinking about it prospectively in terms of how you might strategically build a network to grow a tipping point.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, it's funny you say that because I think I'd share this with you when I emailed you about this. I remember when I started the podcast, I had this ridiculous notion that I would interview all these really well-known bloggers. They would tweet my interviews with their thousands or tens of thousands of followers and every interview would go viral. And of course, within three months, it became very apparent to me that was not going to happen. And I realized it was our listeners who were actually causing the show to grow. And funny enough, like a lot of our early guests were basically nobodies.

we're on our show and to this day I still keep that in mind. Like I will always choose somebody who I think is interesting over somebody who's famous. And sometimes I've done it at the cost of metrics. But I think that's part of, to me, you know, you basically explain the science behind why that worked.

Damon Centola

Yeah, I think that's a great example. And I'm so happy to hear that that's part of what you've experienced with the growth of the show. I think I might've mentioned to you that the emails I get from people, largely who've read the book and gotten excited about it, are folks who've experienced this at their workplace or in growing the activist movements they've grown or even the nonprofits they've tried to grow.

their success has come in these ways that are not obvious, given the standard sort of theory of influencers. And I get a lot of these anecdotes from people, which is, in some ways it would have been nice to get these before I wrote the book, so I could have included them in different chapters. But there's a lot of anecdotes, these really interesting anecdotes from all these different quarters of social life where people are saying, like, this is exactly how I've experienced it, that it's grown in this way through the periphery that we reached a tipping point and then things changed. And thank you for finally having a theory that explains this.

Srini Rao

Heheheheheheh!

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I mean, my most influential mentor, the guy who came with the name for the show and got me to where I'm at, had 150 followers on Twitter and was six weeks into his project. And to this day, nobody, I mean, and I've interviewed some pretty well-known people, none of them have had the same impact as he did. Let's talk about, you know, one other thing.

that you talk about, which is this whole idea. You say that to create real change, you need to do more than spread information. You have to change people's beliefs and behaviors, and those are much harder to influence. So when somebody like a Gary Vee, for example, just to give us something concrete, is able to build this sort of massive falling, what is he doing that's changing people's beliefs and behaviors, and is any of it just nonsense?

Damon Centola

Yeah, I mean, I think that's really the question of change really has to go with when we see something spreading. Are we seeing something that, you know, kind of reinforces people's kind of existing conceptions and ideas of like who they are, how they work, what they believe in? Or are we seeing the growth of a movement that actually shifts people's beliefs and their patterns of behavior? And I think a great example of this is something like sustainability, right?

We see a lot of polarization in the US in the question of climate change and the question of like what sustainable practices should be. And so one of the questions that comes up is, well, what strategy would you use if you just wanted to get people to change their practices around sustainability and energy consumption? And that winds up being kind of the bread and butter of it, which is, well, you can get people to talk about these things in different ways, but when do we actually see change in people like putting solar panels on their houses or people starting to, you know,

turn lights off and use air conditioners less. And that's where I think the scientific studies that have been done around these sort of these network phenomena are so enlightening because people's own perceptions of what's gonna be effective for them. If you ask them, and this is what the studies have done that I think is so enlightening, is to say, you know, what would be most effective for you? Do you want money? Do you want it? Do you want to, you know, just a good sense of your role as a civic?

person or a member of the environmental community, do you want some kind of public recognition? What is it that would get you to change your behavior? And people have lots of ideas. We all have beliefs about ourselves and what would get us to do something. But then when you look at studies that have given people those incentives and then compare them to other studies that have done experimental controls where they give people other incentives, but just don't tell them about it. You give people.

the sort of social network information about what other people in your community are doing. But don't sort of highlight that this is supposed to be a mechanism for change. Just sort of provide it and see what happens. It turns out that people's guesses about what incentives are going to help them change are consistently wrong. Right? We're very bad at interpreting and predicting our own behavior. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, the science we can do is so informative now.

Damon Centola

because we can hold those sort of guesses side by side with the strategies that are effective and see just how effective the sort of networking and the periphery strategies are for shifting people's behavior in ways that people themselves don't even recognize. I think one of the most compelling findings was that after people had already changed their behavior to say that the intervention had been effective, the researchers went back and asked them,

Damon Centola

And people still gave the same answers that they gave originally, which is that some financial incentives would be good, some awareness about social consciousness and environmental preservation would be good. In other words, even when the networks around us change our behavior, we're somehow oblivious to the work that those networks are doing. And so I think that when we look at change, we have to sort of fundamentally say, well, if we see someone becoming successful, they're becoming successful because they're just...

speaking to the beliefs and biases that people have and kind of reaffirming them in a way that feels satisfying? Or are they somehow initiating a change process that's shifting people's way of acting and thinking even though people may themselves may not recognize it?

Srini Rao

Well, one other question I have about this, and you wrote extensively about weak ties and strong ties, as well as bridges. Can you talk about that in the context of a social network, like how that all works?

Damon Centola

Yeah, so this is kind of the bread and butter of, I would say, sociology in the last 30, 40 years. There were a set of really nice results. This is the scholar, Mark Grandivetter, who in some ways, in many ways, actually was an intellectual hero of mine. And he was the first one to really kind of put all of these sort of network ideas together in a really concrete and coherent way that was extremely impactful on the development of the field of sociology and subsequently computer science applied physics. It just had a...

a broad, broad impact. And what he said was, look, you know, most of us have friends and family who kind of know each other. We're in these sort of social clusters. But occasionally we meet someone who we don't know that well. They're kind of a casual contact. They're essentially a stranger. Someone you, you know, pre-COVID, someone you might've met like at an airport or sitting next to on an airplane. And you'd exchange ideas with them. They tell you about a new app. You tell them about a new, you know, show on HBO that you like. And then you go your separate ways because your social world and their social world are in different universes.

And the idea is that social tie is, you know, fairly meaningless to you in terms of like all the people that matter to you in your life. It's a kind of a weak tie in terms of the affect and the emotion that you invest in it. But the point that Grand Aventer makes is, look, that tie, because, you know, you and that other person live in like different social circles, that connection between you actually acts as this like long distance bridge that links these different parts of the social world.

And the more of these long distance bridges there are, the faster that a new information about a new app or information about a new television program or information about a new job can kind of propagate from group to group to group all around the world. And this became in many ways the sort of the idea and the concept, the sort of formalization that sat behind the viral model of spreading and that tied in with our sort of our classic notion of the influence in the sense that a person with lots and lots of weak ties

is someone who's in a good position to spread lots of stuff. And so by contrast, our strong ties are our friends and family. And of course, we have lots of trust and intimacy with our friends and family. But they also have these patterns of connection, where they tend to form little triangles. So like, I know my best friend, and my best friend knows my sister, and my sister knows me. So these form into little social triangles. And so the more of these triangles there are,

Damon Centola

the more the information kind of bounces around among the same people versus like jumping out to different communities. And that was in many ways the big insight of Brando Vedder's work, which I think put sociology on a kind of a new footing, really, for decades. And what I sort of contributed to this literature was to sort of interrogate whether that theory of spreading and that sort of theory of weak ties worked the same way for

disease and information spreading on the one hand, and real behavior change and norm change on the other. And that was, I said that the big insights were that when I started to look at this, I started to get results that were really counterintuitive and that they were contradicting the last like 30 or 40 years of science. And it was, I was seeing the opposite of what I was supposed to see, where you put, you put the contagion into the little network model and instead of speeding up, it would slow down.

And so that's a bizarre finding, right? That you put these weak ties and it's supposed to speed things up and it was slowing it down and then ultimately preventing spreading at all. And so this is what got me to start thinking about, well, what's going on here and what scientifically is there a deep explanation that we can come up with that helps us to kind of understand these sort of classes of cases, cases where we want to understand the viral spread of COVID-19? Absolutely. We want to understand the viral spread of misinformation? Absolutely.

Does that theory that help us to understand effective ways of getting people vaccinated or effective ways of spreading face masks? It turns out no. It turns out that if you want to sort of propagate behavior change or acceptance of new social norms, then you need different network strategies. And that's really where that distinction of strong and weak ties comes in, in terms of thinking about social spreading.

Srini Rao

When I hear you explain this, I'm thinking about this whole idea of virality. I remember Seth Godin saying to me once that he said something out of his like 8,000 or 10,000 blog posts, God knows how many there are at this point since he's been doing it every day for 10 years. None of them have ever gone viral. And yet, if you look up blog on the internet, I think Seth is probably the first person that comes up. And I wonder, this is kind of my sort of interpretation of some of this based on experience, a blog post or two that goes viral.

these people coming back and you don't actually build any semblance of a relationship or connection with them, the virality basically, today's viral sensation becomes tomorrow's afterthought. But I wonder how you think about that. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

Damon Centola

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think there. Well, I think, yeah, there's a no, it's a it's a very interesting point. I think it goes to kind of a deeper, a deeper topic that I don't think I explored it as in depth in this book, but I've explored it in my in my previous book, which is the question of kind of what can be thought of as like deep and shallow contagions, right? So if you conceptualize the space of social media, but more generally, the space of kind of, you know,

networks and information spreading across the world, it's denser now than it was a decade or two decades ago. There's just more and more stuff. And what that means is that there's kind of a competition in that space. There's like, you can only watch so much stuff in a day and stuff is flooding by so quickly that essentially certain things are going to gain attention and certain things aren't. Now

If it happens that the networks that make things spread fast are also the networks that kind of select on, what for lack of a better word, we could call kind of shallow, convenient, familiar ideas, then it means that the vast majority of the things we're gonna see spreading are things that are, unless we go looking for them, are things that are shallow, convenient and familiar. And so you've got this kind of process of what could...

for lack of a better word, is like co-evolution. The networks are forming and then the content is forming to adapt the networks because everyone's trying to get their content to spread the fastest and spread the farthest. Well, this creates a kind of evolutionary process in like the, you know, in the real classical sense of evolution where, you know, there's kind of a competition to be kind of the fittest meme or the fittest message where fit really just means spreading to more people. And so if the networks that make things spread,

are most effective for spreading simple contagions, simple ideas, then those are the things that are going to be populating from the point of view of marketers and political campaigns, populating our intellectual and social space. And if the networks that then support the spread of complex contagions are less prominent and as a result of the success of these other kinds of contagions, less attractive, then we'll see a kind of...

Damon Centola

kind of economy or a competition where we'll see fewer and fewer complex contagions and more and more simple contagions. And that has all kinds of interesting feedback effects. It means that the science of how we study this stuff, if our science is based on massive data collection, that our science will start to select more and more simple contagions and start to believe that is the universe of contagions as opposed to the complex contagions which are there and which we've seen in things like Black Lives Matter, but which are, you know,

less day-to-day than the other kinds of memes that we see kind of getting traction and spreading wildly. And so I think that it's an interesting scientific observation but actually has meaningful social implications too for how we cultivate the kinds of social networks that we'd like to see you know in online communities to foster the kinds of the kinds of ideas and the sort of depth of interaction that we'd like to help sustain over the course of like the next iteration of culture

you know, pretty much happening online at this stage.

Srini Rao

Well, let's talk about the myth of stickiness, because you say the myth of stickiness tells us that key product features offer a solution. If an initiative fails, the solution is to redesign your innovation with these features in mind, make it easier to use, make more striking or more memorable, less costly, or spruce up your campaign by making the messaging more fun and more emotionally engaging. And it just makes me think about something like conversion rate optimization, where I'm sitting around tweaking my website to say, OK, well, if we change this headline, will more people sign up for the newsletter? But

you're basically you're kind of questioning that and then you go on to say the less familiar innovation is the greater the resistance to it typically will be. So how do you overcome that resistance and you know how do we stop wasting time on apparently what things that we think are going to be effective but are not?

Damon Centola

Yeah, and I think social networks wind up being interesting here because they're both the problem and the solution. So one of the examples I give in the book is like Google Glass, right? And it's one of those cases where, yeah, you can design a, you know, a sticky, memorable, easy to talk about product. You can advertise it that way. You know, Google Glass, for those who don't remember, it's like a cyborg, you know, technology for, you know, surveilling and observing your visual world while talking to people.

And what was interesting about it was that they used, Google used influencers and they used sort of sticky advertising technologies, but the technology didn't just fail. It like backfired. People wound up referring to people who wore glass as glassholes and they wound up becoming like noticeably different from the rest of the population who they were trying to inspire to become glass wearers actually became a kind of counter movement against the product that was so effective that the product line was canceled and that actually Google's reputation.

was damaged by the product. And so the question is, well, what happened there? Why wouldn't stickiness solve the problem? Because it was this sticky product marketed by influencers. And the answer is, well, there are social norms in the population that are kind of the starting point for engaging anyone. And the real thing to think about is, well, are those social norms going to inspire people to react negatively to this idea? So the stickier and the more compelling I make it,

the more strongly people are gonna react to the initiative. And this is exactly what happened. You've got kind of a social backlash based on the fact that people felt like, you know, browsing the web and a face-to-face conversation was rude and that using a kind of clandestine surveillance technology was a violation of privacy and smacked of like big technology exploiting regular citizens. And so it wound up being a kind of

an innovation that although it was sticky was nevertheless socially offensive. And I think this is the question really that gets to the sort of use of stickiness, which is if you if you perceive that social norms are going to be an obstacle to an initiative, then the goal isn't to make the initiative as sort of widely known and, you know, widely sticky as possible, because what happened for Google Glass was that they actually had to try to undo the stickiness because everyone remembers Google Glass because of how sticky it was to talk about.

Damon Centola

And Google actually tried to get people to forget that. What you really want to think about is, well, what are the norms in a population that might cause an objection to this initiative? And how, instead of trying to overwhelm those norms by broadcasting this thing as widely as possible and making it as attractive as possible, how could I shift people's expectations about what they think is normal?

And this is where the sort of network strategies become so interesting, is that when we look at the changes in social behavior that have been successful, we really see is they've gotten into the network in the right way and sort of to shift from the inside out, people's norms about the way that we talk to each other and the expectations that we have in day to day life. And as a result of shifting those, then all of a sudden, new products and ideas become sort of palatable, they become interesting and relevant. And so the...

I would say the solution to that kind of stickiness conundrum is to say, okay, we'll take a close look at the social networks and the norms within those networks, and then strategize about how to sort of engage with the population in a way that is specific to their existing beliefs and norms. And this kind of thing comes up in public health all the time. It's like a famous, I would say, bit of difficulty for public health campaigns in the US, but also in Sub-Saharan Africa, where

They've got great interventions designed to save lives, they're free, they've done everything to make it as sticky as possible. And people not only wind up not using it, but wind up retaliating against it. Again, because the stickiness of the product is somehow exacerbating the cultural backlash because the product itself violates people's social norms. And so the challenge, and really what the book is about, is how do you get inside the norms that people have?

And how do you sort of move this process of normative convergence to a tipping point where the norms themselves change? And then all of a sudden, you know, lots of new products become acceptable because the norms that people have shifted.

Srini Rao

When I hear you explain it like that, the two things that come to mind for me were Airbnb and Uber, because I remember Chris Sokka and many venture capitalists who first heard the idea of Airbnb were like, people are going to get murdered. There's no way we're going to invest in this company. And same thing with Uber. If you're like, you're going to get into a car with a complete stranger, like what did our parents tell us every time we were around? Don't talk to strangers. And yet those are now social norms. So for somebody listening to this who's a content creator, for example, starting from the ground up.

Damon Centola

Right.

Damon Centola

Exactly.

Srini Rao

a very theoretical level and it I think that's why I like this book is because you gave us more of a compass than a map and at the same time I know there are people who are gonna say okay well thank you Shreen now I have to go read this book listen to Damon talk about this a hundred times and I still won't know what the hell to do but let's just you know bring it down to you know from the sort of high level you know overview to okay let's look at it on concrete on the ground let's just

Damon Centola

I'm sorry.

Srini Rao

use something as simple as, I'm gonna start a blog. If I were gonna use your ideas to start a blog, I think I intuitively understand them because I've done this for 10 years. But if I'm starting out, everything you just said probably would have gone over my head.

Damon Centola

Yeah, right, we're talking at a really kind of general level. So to address exactly that issue, and I think one of the goals of the book is to say, okay, I would like people to sort of have, I personally am always frustrated with books that give lots of like funny anecdotes, interesting details, but don't actually have an overarching theory. Like they don't actually have grounded science that's like systematic that helps us to sort of locate this within the history of ideas. We're just like, okay, here's some cute anecdotes, and then here's a kind of, you know,

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Damon Centola

an easy synthesis. I feel like what's compelling for me is that the scientific work is building on the stuff we've been doing for the last, like I said, 30, 40 years and really presents a kind of shift, a sea change in how we think about these kinds of things. And that really should have implications because all of this science is what sits behind all of the kind of popular books in this space. So once we have a new scientific idea of how the world works, we should actually have new practical implications. And that's kind of where the book ends.

do these kinds of seven strategies at the end of the book with a kind of layout in fairly specific terms. And I would say that one is to think about the sort of topic I was talking about earlier about building bridges. When we think about building bridges, we think about like establishing a connection to someone from a different group. And the real concept with bridge isn't so much the distance between groups, which is the classic weak tie concept of groups far away.

It's the width of the bridge. And that's really a new concept that comes from these scientific breakthroughs, is that the number of overlapping ties in the bridge winds up being like the key factor for determining the success and effectiveness of that bridge in creating kind of a coordinated understanding across different groups. And I elaborate this in detail with the Black Lives Matter example, but also with the growth of Silicon Valley. It shows up again and again, these different contexts that you start to see these sort of overlapping, intertwining connections across different

either different organizations or different social groups, and you start to see them coordinate just naturally on a new way of thinking and talking. And this really, this seems like, you know, you just say, oh, people are coordinating. It doesn't seem deep. It is incredibly deep because fundamentally what we are doing in society is coordinating with each other. And the vast majority of this coordination is done without ever thinking about it. You just don't, you just, when you're walking down the street, you just don't bump into other people.

And now with COVID, with regard to our shifting social norms about how to handle social space, we're all kind of bumping around together and trying to figure out collectively how to maintain ourselves in a space that we're sharing. And this is also happening online. What kinds of ways of talking are acceptable or not acceptable? What sort of topics are acceptable or not acceptable? We're all kind of figuring this out together. And this is an evolutionary process. It never, ever stops. And the point is,

Damon Centola

that by building bridges across communities, specifically looking to communities that you want to establish relationships with and thinking about it in a more systematic fashion than just weak ties in all directions. But thinking about building overlapping ties with specific groups and then creating kind of a coordinated language across these groups and then building overlapping ties to still other groups and still other groups creates kind of a more systematic and kind of constructive way of building an architecture and what I referred to as an infrastructure.

that fundamentally supports change. And so that's a, I describe in detail in the book, like examples of how you can go about doing that. And I give examples in organizations and so forth about the strategies a person would use to do this. But the point is that it winds up being more effective than in a way it should be, because it's just a way of kind of, it's just a different networking strategy is all it is. But it has these kinds of properties in terms of supporting

change and supporting innovation adoption and supporting a way of thinking that grows beyond any one group's agenda and creates kind of a collective agenda for the group in a way that's very, very powerful. And again, this is where examples like Silicon Valley and Black Lives Matter stand out because we've got these instances of social change that are so powerful. So I would say that's building wide bridges and what that means is really one of the most effective ways of thinking about how to construct

networks in a way that moves beyond the kind of classical theories of spreading and viral spreading. And then I would say a second point, and this really goes to social media in particular, is that one of the things I found is that as people interact together, if the structure is right, if you build these kinds of communities in the right way, people actually get smarter. And it's remarkable to see these when you can study, you know,

We've studied Democrats and Republicans talking about climate change. We say smokers and nonsmokers talking about smoking risks. In my last study, I studied, you know, physicians looking at patients of different race and gender. And in all these cases, initially, you get these like hugely biased responses. You get, you know, Republicans and Democrats biased about climate change exactly the way you would think. And you get even clinicians biased against a Black female patient versus a white male patient in ways that are kind of horrific to see. But then the question is, is there a strategy of using these kinds of

Damon Centola

network interventions to shift people's way of talking and thinking about these topics that's effective even for like professional doctors And the answer is yeah, what one really important thing you can do is To create a space where people aren't hindered by their personal status or they're sort of What you may think of as like their loyalty to some kind of organization or some kind of tribe so

in the case of Democrats or Republicans, the extent to which you can reduce, you know, memes and videos and graphics that remind people of like political identity, it actually allows people to kind of move into a conversation that's really productive just by virtue of kind of eliminating these other factors from their sort of social environment.

Srini Rao

I feel like this is a really deep rabbit hole. My guess is obviously you've spent a good amount of real life doing this work. I feel like there's, is there a follow-up book to this? Cause I feel like there would be.

Damon Centola

Yeah, well, that's a great point. In many ways, when you write a book, your next book is like, your last chapter of the book is like, is like anticipating what I wanna do next. And so in many ways, I think that my first book was, kind of raised a bunch of questions at the end of the book that were like what this book change was all about, was like, okay, how do we actually use this? And where, and this book is starting to ask these questions

Srini Rao

Yep.

Damon Centola

about bias, really about the biases we have, you know, in the most obvious basic way, you know, when we say, well, you know, people, there's partisan and political bias, but in deeper ways, in ways that are, you know, not obvious that are, you know, either cultural bias or even just cognitive bias, like the ways that we perceive things. And whether those are things that are just kind of like fixed or whether there are ways in which the same kind of social change process I described in this book.

can also be thought of as really a collective intelligence process. Like, is there a way of structuring populations, structuring communities, structuring hospitals, structuring civic organizations, creating connections among, you know, hospital groups and patient groups in a way that creates just greater intelligence in the community as a whole? And what this does, this whole sort of new, this new book that I'm working on,

What it does is it just eliminates the whole concept of experts and of people who sort of, you know, have higher status or greater authority and shows that when we do this in an effective way, there's there are like really deep lessons that come out of this where you can have doctors making better, more accurate decisions by virtue of not deferring to the highest, most senior doctor by virtue of like taking some of the junior residents into account or, you know, have political leaders make better decisions.

by virtue of including regular citizens' information and ideas, because really there's just this tremendous amount of tacit knowledge that is in our day-to-day lives. And it's rarely extracted and it's rarely integrated into our decision-making. And I don't think that's anyone's fault. I think it's just the way that we've kind of built our institutions. But what I realized as a result of thinking through this, this process of social change is that the next step past change is,

Okay, once you successfully initiate a tipping point and change everything, then what does society look like then? What are the relevant structures for living a good life where we're not trying to have change after change after change. We're trying to initiate successful change to reach some kind of new plateau or new standard of productivity or innovation or intelligence as a society.

Damon Centola

And that's really what the next book is about, is showing that we can use the ideas from the change process to then build infrastructures that allow us to sort of be more productive and fundamentally more engaged society.

Srini Rao

It's funny, just based on our conversation, I feel like I'm gonna have to go back and read your book again. And I took thorough notes on it. I rewrote all your notes, you know, your key insights in my own words. And even after this conversation, I want to go back to read it. But this has been really, really fascinating. And for people who are listening, I honestly I can't recommend Damon's book highly enough. It was hands down the best book I read in 2022. And those of you know, me know, I read a lot of damn books. So for me to say that should carry some weight, hopefully. I

one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews on the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Damon Centola

I knew it was going to be one of these like brain teaser questions. So I'm stumped because I'm not really quite sure what we mean by unmistakable. You mean just stand out noteworthy?

Srini Rao

I

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, well, it's funny. Yeah, I guess that is the way you know, when you write a book called unmistakable, you know, as you do with any publisher, you have to actually define it. So yeah, that is how I defined it as something that nobody else could do but you.

Damon Centola

I would say that, well, I guess my feeling is that it all has to do with the expectations and the sort of the, I'm going to take a sociological take on this, right? That I think it has to do with the norms that we're familiar with and that we are used to seeing and something that violates our expectations, that's counterintuitive, really stands out and is hopefully something that becomes an unmistakable reference for thinking about a problem in a way that we have never thought about it before.

Srini Rao

beautiful. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story wisdom and insights for our listeners. I hope you get to writing that next book quickly because I like your you know, your recent one so much and I'm going to go buy your other book. Where can people find out more about you the book, your work and everything else you're up to?

Damon Centola

So there's the research group, which is called the Network Dynamics Group. And this is kind of, you know, it's like for scientists and journalists, really. But then the idea is to give a kind of public access vehicle for everything that we do. So it's got all the studies, the studies that are talked about in this book, in addition to studies that I've been working on, you know, for decades. And then also the new latest stuff that we're sort of doing right now.

like on facts and hesitancy, on conspiracy theories, all these kinds of things. Like all of this stuff is up there. One of the interesting things about the Network Dynamics Group site is that, in addition to including quick video summaries of the projects and the major results we have, it also includes all of the scientific papers and all of the data, if anyone wants to just download and play with it. It's just a playground for people who are interested in this kind of research.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.