Abstract:

Can networks protect us from disinformation? Can the science of collective intelligence restore our capacity for productive online discourse? I offer new findings on the intelligence of collectives, which show that the greatest source of group wisdom is people’s ability to influence one another. However, the key to our collective intelligence lies in the structure of that influence. I present results from a series of independently replicated and experimentally controlled online disinformation campaigns regarding vaccine safety. I show how changes to the topological connectivity of online networks enable “wisdom of the crowd” learning dynamics that effectively counteract disinformation campaigns, even among homogeneous populations (i.e., “echo chambers”) subjected to targeted attacks. These results reveal an unexpected relationship between network structure and the emotional quality of online discussions, which correspond to significant changes in communities’ endogenous capacity for distributed collective learning.

About the speaker:

Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Before coming to Penn, Damon was a Professor of System Dynamics at M.I.T and a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University. He is a leading expert on social networks and behavior change. Damon’s work has received numerous awards including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Sociological Methodology; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent based modeling environment, and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Facebook, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN, among other outlets. His speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cigna, Google, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Heart Association, General Motors, the National Academies, the U.S. Army and the NBA. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press, and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton, 2018), and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little Brown, 2021).

General information and registration:

If you are interested in joining this seminar, please register via the registration form. Upon registration we will send you a confirmation and the video link (Zoom) a few days in advance. For more information, please contact the secretariat of the Amsterdam Business School at secbs-abs@uva.nl.