Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-The Lessons from a New Science, by Alex Pentland

Bringing polycultural organizations to life: A network analytic strategy

“…The emerging polyculturism perspective seeks to address inclusion shortcomings by emphasizing the interconnectedness of the workforce. With repeated interactions greater trust is engendered, promoting pro-social behaviors that benefit the entire organization (Pentland, 2012). This is consistent with social network practices where informational advantage is gained by tapping into under-connected pockets of the organization, allowing for increased flow of knowledge and mutual influence.…”

“…• Provide Behavioral Models: Observing the behaviors of others and the resultant consequences, even when such observations are incidental, has substantial impact on changing the future behavior of the observer (Bandura & Walters, 1977). Indeed, due to the speed of uptake, Pentland (2012) suggests that as much as 90% of our learning should take place through observing others. As such, developing a culture of sharing information across boundaries may be as simple as modeling the desired behaviors and positively reinforcing them in others.…”

Behavioural economics: What have we missed? Exploring ‘classical’ behavioural economics roots in AI, cognitive psychology and complexity theory

“…Identifying these offers ways of developing accurate predictive models that are scientifically grounded, can help in understanding and improving our societal well-being and public health, and inform how we might cope with crises such as pandemics, climate/weather disasters, and other nasty and often unexpected events. Big Data provides new opportunities in understanding the dynamics of social interactions by observing actual behaviour rather than just beliefs (Pentland, 2014;Torgler, 2019). Mobility data allow us to harness human digital footprints or "digital bread-crumbs" of our activities (Almaatouq et al, 2016, p. 407).…”

Networks of Beliefs: An Integrative Theory of Individual- and Social-Level Belief Dynamics

“…How can a single theory of belief change answer these questions and explain a plethora of phenomena including polarization, radicalization, minority influence, and real-world belief patterns? These and other questions about belief formation and change have been investigated in a wide range of disciplines, from psychology (Ajzen, 1991;Latane & Wolf, 1981;Vallacher, Read, & Nowak, 2017;Dalege et al, 2018), sociology (Friedkin & Johnsen, 1990;Proskurnikov & Tempo, 2017), cultural evolution (Boyd & Richerson, 1985;Hoppitt & Laland, 2013), and economics (Acemoglu & Ozdaglar, 2011;Golub & Sadler, 2016), to statistical physics (Castellano et al, 2009;Pentland, 2014) and applied mathematics (Hickok et al, 2022). This large body of work has provided a plethora of empirical findings and theories about the structure, formation, and change of beliefs.…”