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Change:
How to Make Big Things Happen

A scientific exploration of how beliefs, behaviors, and ideas spread through social networks for a popular audience. A big think book that will delight fans of Malcolm Gladwell, Chip and Dan Heath, and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s NUDGE.

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Praise for Change:

 
Testimonials

“An utterly fascinating read that will challenge some of your core assumptions about how social change happens.”

— Adam Grant, Wharton Professor and NYT Bestselling Author of Give and Take, Originals and Option B

"This remarkable book provides a powerful way to think about change…a critically important guide to effecting change in our individual lives, businesses, societies, and beyond."

— Jonah Berger, Wharton Professor and bestselling author of The Catalyst and Contagious

"This is a timely must-reading for any leader who wants to meet the forces of resistance head-on and steer behavior in positive directions."-

— Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School

 
 
 

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Damon Centola is a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication, the Department of Sociology, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group.

 
This week, I spoke with Hachette Book Group @hachetteus on The Current podcast about the science of tipping points to explain whether social networks need regulation. Should the U.S. regulate Facebook or Twitter? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Why do some companies become household names, while others flame out? How do certain memes go viral? And why do some social movements take off and spread, while others fizzle? I spoke with Hidden Brain about social contagion, and how it can be harnes
This is a great writeup by @StarTribune that starts to take research from my labs into application in social media. Worth the read!
The introspection illusion offers a clear insight into this blind spot: people explain their own behavior in terms of what they feel inside, rather than what is happening outside. This simple observation has big implications for the science of social
Only certain forms of similarity create relevance—and they vary based on the situation. Your spouse is relevant for some decisions, but not for others. The same holds true of your college classmates, your professional colleagues, your fellow ho

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Yes Magazine: The 25% Tipping Point

Social scientist Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania has studied how social change happens, from the civil rights movements to the Arab Spring revolutions to #metoo and #BlackLivesMatter. Much about how social change happens is predictable, and he examines the implications of that for grassroots strategies in his upcoming book Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little Brown, 2021).

 

WHYY PBS: Masking and Vaxxing for the Public Good

With self-quarantining and social distancing, much of what public health experts are asking of us during the pandemic is for the good of society as a whole. It slows the spread of the disease and protects the most vulnerable among us. Yet, we’ve seen a lot of resistance to wearing masks and many people report they are reluctant to getting a COVID vaccine. This hour, how to get people to think and act in more pro-social and altruistic ways. University of Pennsylvania’s Damon Centola and MIT’s Erez Yoeli join us.

 

Scientific American: Damon Centola Explains Why Social Media Makes Us More Polarized and How to Fix It

As a scientist who studies networks, I’m used to being surprised by the results of my experiments. Technology has allowed us to access more information and data about people’s social networks, debunking many of our assumptions about human behavior. But even my team at the Network Dynamics Group was surprised: Why did our social media experiment find the opposite of what happens all the time in the real world of social media?

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