Are trends based on a few Influentials pushing them to their “tipping point” or are they more random?
Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.
The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.
February 1st, 2008 at 1:27 pm
[...] Watts, who was highlighted in a Fast Company article I linked to yesterday, also was the brains behind Music Lab, a social experiment that attempted to measure how people [...]