Unlike Disease, Behavior Spreads Faster in Clustered Networks (1 of 2) (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Unlike Disease, Behavior Spreads Faster in Clustered Networks (1 of 2)

Caption

Research on the spread of health-centered behavior describes how the structure of social networks can influence how behaviors travel through a population. Figures show experimentally manipulated on-line social networks. The first community has a clustered network structure, while the second one is a more "random" casual contact network. Node colors indicate people who adopted a behavior (blue) and those who did not (white), with lighted links showing the active pathways of communication. The clustered networks spread the behavior to more people than the casual contact networks. This image relates to an article that appeared in the Sept. 3, 2010, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The study, by Dr. D. Centola at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., was titled, "The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment."

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