A Book Summary | Change by Damon Centola (2021)

Many of our global challenges (especially their existential scale) are the consequences of the unintended effects of technological change (e.g. climate change) but solutions need to be primarily socio-cultural and political. If we rely solely on technologies (e.g. geoengineering), we are set for the catastrophic tipping points in the earth system dynamics.

This realisation (partly as an outcome of my thesis) motivated me to pick up a book, ‘Change: how to make big things happen’, by Damon Centola, Director of the Network Dynamics Group at the Annenberg School for Communication / University of Pennsylvania. It is based on the insights from the network science and what it “tells us about how and why and when human behavior changes”.

I would like to acknowledge and highlight that in the following content, I have mostly quoted verbatim from the original text. This is more of a summary rather than a review. Full credits to the original author for everything

Damon Centola

The key insight:

“ ideas and behaviors do not spread virally; a simple exposure is not enough to “infect” people

when it comes to adapting a new belief or behavior, we are guided, much more than we realize, by our social networks”

In Part I of the book, Centola seeks to debunk the pervasive myths about social change:

• Highly connected people, so called social influencers are typically not the early adapters. By virtue of their extensive connections, “they are more likely to know many more people who have not adopted a particular innovation” (‘counterveiling influences’) and hence their approval signifies a later milestone of social approval
• By contrast, people on the network peripheries are more likely to be the pioneers (more on that, later)
• “The story of change is not only a story of pioneering social innovations that disrupt markets and challenge the powerful. Remarkably, it is also a story of how the people who are most in need of new solutions often resist them”
• “Regardless of how they’re packaged, new products and ideas are not easily adopted when they threaten established beliefs and social norms” Cultural and social norms are not so easily outsmarted
• “ Attempts to spread everything from vaccinations to environmental technologies to new management practices have faced the same challenge. The less familiar and more disruptive an innovation is, the greater the resistance to it will typically be. This is the primary reason why social change is so difficult.”
• The myth of virality: None of the major behavioral or social changes that have happened in the last half-century have spread the way viruses do.

source: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108380867.012

In Part II of the book, author elucidates on the drivers of social change:

A key distinction: the weak ties vs the strong ties

“Simple contagions (e.g. virus) have defined how we think about social spreading for over a century.

Complex contagion is any change that involves real risk — financial, psychological, or reputational and requires more than simply coming into contact with a single random adopter or “carrier.”

Redundancy is the key for the spread of complex contagion.

“Although redundancy slows down the spread of information, it speeds up the spread of adoption… Entrenchment often appears to be an obstacle to social change, but it is actually the key to achieving it.”

One needs to be aware of and overcome the four potential barriers to the spread of complex contagion:

• Coordination
• Credibility (is it effective?)
• Legitimacy (is it acceptable?)
• Excitement (is it cool?)

On a corresponding theme — The Principles of Relevance: The Power of People Like Us and Unlike Us:

Principle 1: “When people need social proof that a particular innovation will be useful for them, then similarity with earlier adopters is a key factor for creating relevance”

Principle 2: “When behavior change requires a degree of emotional excitement, or feelings of loyalty and solidarity, then — once again — similarity among the sources of reinforcement will help to inspire behavior change.”

Principle 3: “When behavior change is based on legitimacy — that is, believing that the behavior is widely accepted — then the opposite is true: diversity among reinforcing sources of adoption is key for spreading the innovation.”

Part III, the 25% tipping point for social change:

Here, author focuses on the social norms:

• they serve an important function of solving a co-ordination dilemma: such as the driving side for vehicles
• they are more like reflexes, we consider them ‘natural’, without considering the alternatives, which is pretty useful in many everyday circumstances
• “Often we don’t notice our norms until we travel to a new place where the norms differ”

The reason that changing a social norm is difficult is the same reason that learning a new language is difficult:

• it requires breaking something that works.
• It requires replacing something familiar and natural with something new and foreign.
• When social norms change, we are suddenly transformed from experts into novices
• The familiar ways of talking and thinking suddenly become obsolete. Years of work are instantly irrelevant

Author concludes,

“For social change to succeed, a revolutionary movement must ferry people across these uncertain waters to a new set of expectations and a new sense of competence. The secret to doing this successfully comes from seeing how language works, and what it reveals about how social norms take hold”.

Wittgenstein!

• Treatise 1 : language as a logical system
• Treatise 2 : treatise 1 is non-sense

“Wittgenstein continued to believe that language was the key to understanding the world. But he no longer believed that logic was the key to understanding language. Rather, language was social. The secret to understanding language was to understand how people play coordination “games” with one another.”

This Wittgensteinian school, a conception of “social life as a series of coordination games” has become a tenet for research on social norms in general.

Author introduces a concept of the tipping point in the coordination games as “the point at which a novel behavior gained enough traction that everyone’s opinion about what was acceptable would suddenly change”.

Furthermore, he stresses, “our need for social coordination is more powerful than our love of tradition — and that that need was the key to social change”.

Author concludes from empirical studies that

Critical mass needed to “tip” social norms is around one quarter of the population.

Furthermore, with an example from the Chinese fifty-cent party, he adds,

“Activists don’t even need to be sincere to trigger a tipping point. They just need to be committed.”

On a different note, “people’s opinions about their own motivations are a poor guide for understanding their behavior”. And “ The history of successful technologies shows a telling pattern. The diffusion of each one was affected by the obvious factors of price, availability, and awareness. But the adoption of each was also clustered socially. People started using these technologies when their friends, neighbors, and colleagues did. The same principle holds true for renewable energy / solar panels”

Practical upshot: to propel change, follow a snowball strategy (pretty obvious if you have been following so far):

“Instead of targeting special people who can spread an innovation far and wide, the snowball strategy is based on targeting special places in the social network where an innovation can take hold. The goal of the snowball strategy is not to convince everyone to adopt at once.”

“The key to the snowball strategy is that all of your change agents know one another.”

Test Case: Agricultural practices in Malawi —

“the snowball strategy targeted change agents with shared contacts in common. Each of these contacts would observe two of their peers adopting pit planting. This made them more willing to learn about the new technique.”

“Just a little social reinforcement can grow into something much larger. And more reinforcement can make it go even faster.”

Other examples, hybrid corn adoption in Iowa and neighborhood-level social influences that drove solar panel adoption in Germany.

“Fun-fact”:

“The spread of solar-panel installations in Europe bears an uncanny resemblance to the spread of the Black Plague six centuries earlier.

The Black Plague had spread geographically because at that time there weren’t any long-distance weak ties for it to exploit. COVID-19 didn’t have this limitation

For the spread of complex contagions, even at the turn of the twenty-first century, innovations still gain legitimacy, credibility, and social currency by being reinforced within people’s close social networks.”

Part IV: Discord, Disruption, and Discovery

Optimizing Innovation: Social Networks for Discovery —

• “ when problems are complex, teams with smaller, less frequent meetings may outperform teams that maintain constant information flow through larger, more frequent meetings. Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has made clever use of this idea with his impromptu “two-pizza rule.” He reasoned that meetings should be small enough to feed everyone with two pizzas. If meetings required more pizzas, they were probably too big; the networks were probably too connected; and the potential for informational diversity, exploration, and innovation was probably being lost”.
• “Networks that facilitate the spread of ideas are necessary for innovation. The networks that brought Chinese innovations to Europe were essential for the European Renaissance, and Europe’s eventual emergence from the Middle Ages. But if innovations spread too rapidly, or if connectedness is too great or too centralized (China), societies lose the capacity for independent exploration”

Bias, Belief, and the Willingness to Change:

• “The fate of many hot-button topics is now governed, to an unnerving degree, by the social networks through which information travels — even if that information contradicts the most impeccable scientific research”.
• “Silos emerge when there are no bridges between groups, preventing valuable information from traveling between them.”
• “A potential solution to the problem of echo chambers (and the misguided beliefs they can foster) is to increase the bridge width across the polarized communities”.
• “We discovered that seemingly irrelevant features of social media — specifically, graphics that remind people about their party loyalties — have a powerful influence on how social networks operate. Wide bridges across groups can facilitate learning and mutual understanding, but only when these interactions are framed in a way that makes diverse participants relevant to each other.”
• “Within political echo chambers, highly connected influencers at the center of the conversation can easily spread misinformation that plays to a group’s biases” (“simple contagion”)
• “contentious ideas that challenge a group’s biases are complex contagions: these ideas face strong opposition and are therefore unlikely to emerge from highly connected individuals facing a sea of countervailing influences.”
• “centralized networks can increase bias — and egalitarian networks can reduce it”
• Pay attention to the voices from the network periphery, it is repositary of untapped knowledge

Seven Fundamental Strategies for Change:

Strategy 1: Don’t rely on (viral) contagiousness.

Strategy 2: Protect the innovators / the early adaptors from the counterveiling / cynical influences.

Strategy 3: Use the network periphery (rather than influential people).

Strategy 4: Establish wide and redundant bridges.

Strategy 5: Create relevance (see above for ‘the principles’, the power of people like us and unlike us).

Strategy 6: Use the snowball strategy (to target bridging groups on the community boundaries).

Strategy 7: Design team networks to improve discovery and reduce bias / influences that reinforce the status quo.

Bottom line: enforcing transformational change entails the goal of propagating replicable norms, not spreading viral information (the old story that “if people are given the right information, the rest will take care of itself” was never enough or will be)

Review Notes:

This book, backed up by a plethora of empitical studies (I skipped most of them in this summary for brevity), addresses two of the most pressing methodological challenges confronting humanity:

• How to foster social changes exigent for sustainable and regenerative futures
• Some pointers to improve our sense-making infrastructures

I did feel that some of the content was repetitive but learning from the key theme of the book, redundancy of information (repeated in different contexts and with different examples), probably serves to spread the message contagion :)

I hope this book contributes in shifting conversations about social transformation to a more effective and solution orientation as opposed to naive optimism, techno-dependency, cynicism or despair over our predicaments.