311: Damon Centola | Understanding Spread Of Ideas, Movements, And Behaviors In “Change”

Professor Damon Centola of the University of Pennsylvania joins on episode 311 to discuss topics from his book Change: How To Make Big Things Happen. We look to spread ideas and behaviors that resonate, and knowing how to do so is a key piece of the process. The more we know about information and behavioral spread, the less we do that is not necessary.

From his bio, “Damon Centola is Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group. Before coming to Penn, he was an Assistant Professor at M.I.T. and a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University.

His research includes social networks, social epidemiology, and web-based experiments on diffusion and cultural evolution. His work has been published across several disciplines in journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Sociology, and Journal of Statistical Physics. Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, and CNN.”