Description:

The Origins of Social Order: New Theory and Experiments

Wednesdays@NICO Seminar | 12:00-1:00 PM, May 6, 2015 | Chambers Hall, Lower Level

Damon Centola, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania
Associate Professor (by courtesy), School of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania
Director, Network Dynamics Group

Abstract
Social conventions are the foundation of social cooperation and productive economic activity, yet very little is known about how and when they form. Prominent theories argue that widely shared social conventions depend up on coordinating mechanisms, such as incentives for global coordination, aggregated information, and social leadership. We explore a competing ‘evolutionary’ theory of conventions, which hypothesizes that broad social coordination can emerge without any of these mechanisms. We use an Internet experiment to study the real-time evolution of endogenous collective behaviors from a ‘state of nature’ in which there are an infinite number of possible conventions and no incentives for global coordination. Our results confirm our formal hypotheses, demonstrating that changes to network connectivity can generate the spontaneous formation of global social conventions. The results have unexpected implications for the evolution of collective behaviors in the expanding online domain.

Bio
Damon Centola is an Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of 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 interests include social networks, social epidemiology, and web-based experiments on diffusion and cultural evolution. His work has been published in Science, American Journal of Sociology, and Circulation. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award in Mathematical Sociology in 2006, 2009, and 2011 from the American Sociological Association, and have garnered the ASA's Goodman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology. Recent popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, and CNN. His research has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Damon is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.