Rapid Communication Networks Less Likely to Shape Individual Behavior

The increasingly interconnected world has made it easier for information and disease to spread. However a new study from Harvard University and Cornell University shows that fewer “degrees of separation” can make social networks too weak to disseminate behavioral change.

The finding that “small world” networks are limited in their power to shape individual behavior could have implications for health care policy and the treatment of epidemics.

Published in the November American Journal of Sociology, the study was led by Damon Centola, a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with Michael Macy of Cornell. The work was done while Centola was a doctoral candidate at Cornell.

“Our research shows that the difference between contagions that spread through simple contact, such as diseases and information, and the spread of behavior, which requires multiple contacts, has important consequences,” says Centola. “We find that while making the world smaller increases the speed at which diseases and information can spread, it can actually slow down, and even prevent, the spread of health behaviors.”

Social networks consist of connections between individuals, whether they are short ties among family or good friends or long ties, as among acquaintances. Long ties are good for hearing about a job opening or housing opportunity since they provide new information that is not already circulating in your closely connected social network. However, when it comes to getting a cholesterol screening or going on a diet, you are more likely to get reinforcing signals from co-workers or neighbors who know each other and can collectively encourage you to change your behavior.

Previous studies have shown that long ties are highly effective at rapidly diffusing information among disparate social groups, and relatively few long ties are necessary to create the effect. Called the “small world theory,” this is exemplified in the idea that everyone on earth is connected by “six degrees of separation.” Extensions of the small world theory have argued that anything to be diffused can travel faster as the world becomes smaller, but this study disproves that generalization.

Most information and diseases have a threshold of one, meaning that contact with one network neighbor is sufficient to pass the contagion to another. Information or diseases can be spread along long ties because reinforcement from multiple sources is not required. However, many changes in behavior have a threshold of greater than one, such as the adoption of a new technology, diet, or exercise routine. In these cases, social affirmation or reinforcement from multiple sources is frequently required, making an isolated contact insufficient to persuade an individual to change her habits.

Using the “small world” model of social networks, the researchers showed that as the connectedness of the world increases, the level of local social reinforcement decreases. While people can get more information from more sources (and are susceptible to contact with greater numbers of germs), they simultaneously have fewer contacts who are connected to each other who can coordinate to provide social reinforcement for desired behavior change.

Closely knit ties are less effective for spreading information because of the increased likelihood that these individuals will know the same people, causing redundancy and repetition of information. However, the same redundancy that inhibits the spread of information provides vital channels of reinforcement for fostering changes in behavior. If social clustering is reduced too much, it may altogether prevent coordination on behaviors that require social reinforcement.

“As the world becomes smaller, these changes in social networks can reduce the ability to spread behaviors that are hard to adopt,” says Centola. “For health agencies, this suggests that the spanning networks that allow disease to spread so rapidly may not be as good for changing behavior. Rather, it may be better to focus on building and extending local, community networks, and encouraging grass roots support for desired behaviors.”

Current research extends these findings into the realm of “virtual” communities. At Harvard, Centola is investigating how building online networks affects the diffusion of health behaviors, while Macy at Cornell is using online data to study the spread of innovations.

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Early Behavior Problems Appear to Lead to Peer Rejection, Friendlessness

Behavior problems in the early grades appear to lead to peer rejection and a lack of friends in elementary school. This, in turn, can lead to early adolescent depression and loneliness.

Those are the findings of a new study by researchers at the Universities of Montreal and Oslo; the study is published in the July/August 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

Researchers collected information from 551 children beginning when the children were 6 years old and continuing annually until they were 13. They also collected information from the children’s teachers, mothers, and peers.

Specifically, teachers and mothers described the children’s levels of anxiety (including a tendency to prefer solitary play and to fear new situations) and their disruptiveness (including physical aggression and hyperactivity) when the children were 6 and 7. Classroom peers reported on the children they liked most and least each year from ages 8 to 11. Children reported how many friends they had each year from ages 8 to 11, as well as their own levels of depression, loneliness, and involvement with delinquent behaviors at ages 12 and 13.

The researchers found that children who were disruptive in early childhood were more likely to be rejected and lack friends in elementary school. Anxious children also tended to have few friends, although they were not more likely to be rejected by their peers.

The study also found that rejection contributes to the risk that children won’t have friends. Children who are rejected early in elementary school are more likely to lack friends later in elementary school.

Both rejection and a lack of friends in elementary school put children at risk for adjustment problems in adolescence, the researchers found. Specifically, children who are rejected in elementary school are more likely to be lonely as adolescents, while children who lack friends in the early grades—a critical time for the development of close, reciprocal relationships—are more likely to be lonely and depressed as teenagers. In contrast, rejection and a lack of friends don’t put children at risk for delinquency—only early disruptiveness does that.

“The study’s findings indicate that the developmental consequences of risky peer relations are not limited to childhood,” according to Sara Pedersen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal’s Research Unit on Children’s Psychosocial Maladjustment and lead author of the study. “These results suggest that interventions to prevent adolescent depression and loneliness should target elementary school peer relationships. The results also reveal that interventions targeting only childhood rejection and friendlessness are unlikely to prevent later delinquency.”

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License to Sin?

A new study by researchers from Duke, USC, and UPenn is the first to explore how questioning can affect our behavior when we have mixed feelings about an issue. The study, forthcoming in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, found that asking people questions, like how many times they expect to give in to a temptation they know they should resist, increases how many times they will actually give in to it.

"Research on attitude formation has increasingly recognized that attitudes can be comprised of separate negative and positive components which can result in attitude ambivalence," explain Gavin Fitzsimons (Duke University), Joseph Nunes (University of Southern California), and Patti Williams (University of Pennsylvania). "In the present research we focus on vice behaviors, those for which consumers are likely to hold both positive and negative attitudes. We demonstrate that asking consumers to report their expectations regarding how often they will perform a vice behavior increases the incidence of these behaviors."

Intention questions are generally perceived as harmless, and the researchers found that this may cause consumers to lower the guard they would otherwise have with more explicitly persuasive pitches, such as advertising. In a series of three experiments, they demonstrate that seemingly benign questioning may serve as a liberating influence that allows consumers to give in to their desires more often than they would have otherwise.

For example, the researchers asked a group of actual college students how often they intended to skip class in the following week. Another control group of students was asked how often they intended to floss. Over the course of a semester, the group that was asked how often they intended to miss class ended up with one more absence, on average, than the group that was not asked.

As the authors explain: "Despite very real negative repercussions, respondents to a question about their future class attendance engaged in the negative behavior (missing class) at a significantly greater rate than those not asked to predict their behavior."

The results were especially pronounced for those with chronically low self-control, and the researchers point out that their findings pose a public policy dilemma for survey researchers who ask questions about vice behaviors in order to gain insight and discourage them.

"Fortunately, we also document two moderators of the effect that can prevent intention questions from exacerbating indulgences in vices," the researchers write, "(a) having people explicitly consider strategies for how they might avoid the behavior, and (b) having people create a self-reward for sticking with their stated usage patterns."

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Developmental, Behavioral Problems May Plague Kids With Asthma

Much of the research surrounding childhood asthma has sought new approaches to managing the disease. However, little was done to address other conditions that often appear along with asthma including depression and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which can negatively affect a child's ability to cope.

Research completed at the University of Virginia Children's Hospital asserts that until these extra conditions or "co-morbidities" are addressed, asthma education programs will not be able to help young patients to the fullest. The results will be published in the April 12 issue of The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

"We can definitively state that families with asthmatic children not only report higher incidences of ADHD, but also of depression, anxiety and learning disabilities," says Dr. James Blackman, developmental pediatrician at the Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center at UVa Children's Hospital and lead study author. "If we can manage these co-morbidities, we can better help children with asthma and their families to manage the disease in the healthiest way possible."

Data for the research came from the National Survey of Children's Health 2003, which was obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics. The survey results came from telephone polls of households with children. Parents who reported that their child had asthma also were asked to report the severity of their children's asthma and any behavior problems. Information was gathered on a total of 102,353 children from ages 0-17 years during 2003-2004. The survey results were analyzed using SUDAAN, specialized software for analyzing clustered data.

The study uncovered depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities as co-morbidities common among children with asthma. The more severe the child's asthma was, the higher the incidence of these types of problems. More than 10 percent of asthmatic children experienced problems that lasted longer than a year and required counseling or treatment.

What's more, these children often missed ten or more days of school, leading parents and caregivers to worry about their children's healthy academic and emotional development.

"What also is important about this research is that it shows how asthma can lead to psychosocial disadvantages for children in our society," adds Blackman.

While the medical and research establishment should continue to address the societal problems of poverty and poor education, Blackman believes that children with asthma need to receive tailored and precise treatments addressing their physical and mental and developmental health. This could lead to fewer missed days in school and fewer calls home to parents for behavioral and academic problems.


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