Contagion and Consistency

How to Facilitate Social Contagion?

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals has proven to be a real challenge. Providing evidence on cost-effective interventions did not prove to be sufficient to secure the trust of national authorities, health care providers and patients. Introducing change in a health system requires a good understanding of the relationships between the actors of the system. Social network analysis can provi...

Can Social Contagion Help Global Health ‘Jump the Shark’?; Comment on “How to Facilitate Social Contagion?”

The instrumental use of social networks has become a central tenet of international health policy and advocacy since the Millennium project. In asking, ‘How to facilitate social contagion?’, Karl Blanchet of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine therefore reflects not only on the recent success, but also hints to growing challenges; the tactics of partnerships, alliances and platfo...

Crowding , Contagion , and Laughter

The phenomenon of contagion is analysed in terms of the intensification explanation of the effect of crowding (high density) on humans. According to the analysis, high density should be expected to increase contagion of a model’s behavior. Groups of three subjects and a confederate listen to humorous tapes under low or high density conditions. In half of the groups the confederate smiles and la...

Security Games and Contagion

Many real-world situations involve attempts to spread influence through a social network. For example, viral marketing is when a marketer selects a few people to receive some initial advertisement in the hopes that these ‘seeds’ will spread the news. Even peacekeeping operations in one area have been shown to have a contagious effect on the neighboring vicinity. Each of these domains also featu...

Neural networks and contagion