Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

by Alex Pentland
Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

by Alex Pentland

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Overview

From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence

If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We’re social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action—and most basic notions of common sense—are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors.

Thanks to the millions of digital bread crumbs people leave behind via smartphones, GPS devices, and the Internet, the amount of new information we have about human activity is truly profound. Until now, sociologists have depended on limited data sets and surveys that tell us how people say they think and behave, rather than what they actually do. As a result, we’ve been stuck with the same stale social structures—classes, markets—and a focus on individual actors, data snapshots, and steady states. Pentland shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic self-interest.

Pentland and his teams have found that they can study patterns of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual content of the information and predict with stunning accuracy how productive and effective that network is, whether it’s a business or an entire city. We can maximize a group’s collective intelligence to improve performance and use social incentives to create new organizations and guide them through disruptive change in a way that maximizes the good. At every level of interaction, from small groups to large cities, social networks can be tuned to increase exploration and engagement, thus vastly improving idea flow. 

Social Physics will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work—and can be made to work better, at every level of society. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a generation, an entirely new way to look at life itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781101625576
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 01/30/2014
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 3 MB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Alex "Sandy" Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program and co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives. He helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health. His research group and entrepreneurship program have spun off more than thirty companies to date. In 2012 Forbes named Pentland one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world. His research has been featured inNatureScience, and Harvard Business Review.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Origin of the Book vii

Acknowledgments xi

1 From Ideas to Actions

Using Big Data to Understand How Human Societies Evolve 1

What Is Social Physics? 4

A Practical Science 6

Big Data 8

A Rich Social Science 10

Plan for the book 15

Data-Rich Societies: Promethean Fire 17

Special Topic: Language 19

Part I Social Physius

2 Exploration

How Can We Find Good Ideas and Make Good Decisions? 25

Social Learning 29

Idea Flow 32

Idea Flow and Decision Making 34

Tuning Networks 38

Exploration 39

3 Idea Flow

The Building Blocks of Collective Intelligence 43

Habits, Preferences, and Curiosity 46

Habits versus Beliefs 55

Collectively Rational, Not Individually Rational 58

Common Sense 60

4 Engagement

How Can We All Work Together? 62

Social Pressure 65

Digital Engagement 70

Subjugation and Conflict 75

Rules of Engagement 77

Next Steps 79

Special Topic: The Mathematics of Social Influence

Part II Idea Machines

5 Collective Intelligence

How Patterns of Interaction Translate into Collective Intelligence 87

Measuring What You Manage 92

Productivity 93

Creativity 96

Improving Idea Flow 103

6 Shaping Organizations

Social Intelligence Through Visualization of Interaction Patterns 105

Engagement 108

Exploration 112

Diversity 114

Social Intelligence 116

7 Organizational Change

Social Network Incentives Can Be Used to Create Instant Organizations and Guide Them Through Disruptive Change 120

Instant Organizations 124

Organizations in Stress 127

Trust 128

Next Steps 131

Special Topic: Social Signals 131

Part III Data-Rich Cities

8 Sensing Cities

How Mobile Sensing Can Enable Cities to Become More Healthy, Safe, and Efficient 137

Visualizing the City 140

Transportation 144

Health and Disease 145

Social Network Interventions 150

Living in a Data-Rich Society 153

9 City Science

How Social Physics and Big Data Are Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Cities and Development 155

The Social Physics of Cities 156

Social Ties in Cities 157

Exploring the City 160

Idea Flow in Cities 165

Designing Better Cities 167

Data-Rich Cities 170

Next Steps 171

Special Topic: Digital Networks Versus Face-To-Face 172

Part IV Data-Rich Societies

10 Privacy

What Will a Data-Rich Future Look Like? 177

A New Deal on Data 180

Enforcement 182

The Wild, Wild Weh 183

Data-Rich Systems: Challenges 184

Social Physics: Promoting Free Will and Human Dignity 189

11 Living with Data

How Social Physics Might Help Us Design a Human-Centric, Data-Rich Society 193

Natural Law: Exchanges, Not Markets 199

Living in a Networked Society 203

Data for Development: D4D 212

Summary: Promethean Fire 215

Appendices:

Reality Mining 217

Openpds 225

Fast, Slow, and Free Will 235

Math 241

Notes 265

References 279

Index 295

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