When it comes to changing health behaviors, it takes more than a far-flung network of friends on Facebook egging you on. It takes a jostling herd, US researchers said on Thursday.
Social scientists have assumed that changing behavior would spread like the flu, which transmits best via individuals with lots of long-distance contacts.
To change behavior, however, you need to be surrounded by the message — with neighbors, family and members in the community all reinforcing the same idea.
“For about 35 years, wisdom in the social sciences has been that the more long ties there are in a network, the faster a thing will spread,” Damon Centola of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose study appears in the journal Science, said in a statement. “It’s startling to see that this is not always the case.”
Knowing how best to influence health behavior is important to health reform as the US turns its focus to preventing disease, rather than treating it.
Researchers have already shown that networks of friends can have a powerful impact on health behavior, influencing smoking, obesity and even happiness.
However, it is not clear which type of network is best.
Centola set up two different types of social networks within an online community of about 1,500 people.
“I had to create a little social petri dish,” Centola said in a telephone interview.
One group consisted of individuals with far-flung ties and the other involved clusters of people who interacted with each other.
“When people signed up, I would assign them ‘health buddies’ in the space of this online social networking site,” Centola said.
To form friendship groups, Centola introduced people to six other people who had similar interests.
“That is the social world that you had,” he said.
The goal was to get people to register for a health forum in which they rated different health services.
The team then seeded the groups with people to encourage them to sign up and they watched to see how quickly people would register.
People in the small friend groups registered four times as fast as those with less connected networks.
“It spread through the population so quickly. It saturates very, very fast,” Centola said.
Social scientists had thought that it would be redundant to give a health message to a person more than once. However, Centola said when it comes to health habits, people are quicker to change when they hear the message from more than one source.
He said the findings are useful when policymakers need to develop strategies to promote vaccinations or health screenings, but it could be equally effective in combating obesity.
“The more difficult the behavior and the more resistant to change, the more vital these densely clustered ties would be,” Centola said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS