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New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases be used to improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior--in voting, health, technology, and finance- occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. Centola´s startling findings show that the same conditions accelerating the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors.

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"Well-organized and well-written, How Behavior Spreads shows that complex and simple contagion processes are different, and that these differences are important for understanding a wide class of diffusion outcomes. This is a fine book."--Peter Bearman, Columbia University

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Damon Centola is an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communications and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is director of the Network Dynamics Group.

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