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

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From one of the worlds 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 MITs 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: Were social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of actionand most basic notions of common senseare 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, weve been stuck with the same stale social structuresclasses, marketsand 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 its a business or an entire city. We can maximize a groups 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 workand 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.

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ALSO BY ALEX PENTLAND

Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World

Social Physics How Good Ideas SpreadThe Lessons from a New Science - image 1

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Social Physics How Good Ideas SpreadThe Lessons from a New Science - image 2

USA Canada UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Copyright 2014 by Alex Pentland

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Pentland, Alex, 1952

Social physics : how good ideas spreadthe lessons from a new science / Alex Pentland.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-62557-6

1. InventionsSocial aspects. 2. Technology transfer. 3. ScienceSocial aspects. 4. Social interaction. I. Title.

T14.5.P45 2014

303.48'3dc23 2013039929

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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Contents

Appendices:

Preface
The Origin of the Book

I live in the future. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I work, is at the center of the innovation universe; virtually any new idea or technology in the world travels through MIT before it shows up on the world stage. MIT is also part of the densest collection of start-up companies in the world (although Silicon Valley is larger). Moreover, the MIT Media Lab, my intellectual home, is probably the worlds foremost place to live the future. For instance, fifteen years ago I ran the worlds first cyborg collective, in which everyone lived and worked with wirelessly connected computers on their bodies and computer displays in their glasses. Many of these ideas eventually find their way out into the world; my former students now lead cutting-edge commercial projects such as Google Glass (glasses with computer screens built in) and Google+ (the worlds second-largest social network).

My privileged position has given me a unique opportunity to see firsthand how creative cultures can harvest new ideas, help them survive and grow, and finally, turn them into practical reality. Perhaps more important, I have also gotten to see how creative cultures must change in order to thrive in the hyperconnected, warp-speed world that is MIT, an environment that the rest of the world is now entering.

What I have learned from these experiences is that many of the traditional ideas we have about ourselves and how society works are wrong. It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.

These ideas are central to the success of the Media Lab, my research group, and to the entrepreneurship program that I direct. I dont teach traditional classes; instead, I bring in visitors with new ideas and get people to interact with others who are on the same journey. When I was academic head of the Media Lab I pushed to get rid of traditional grading; instead, we have tried to grow a community of peers where respect and collaboration on real-world projects is the currency of success and further opportunity. We live in social networks, not in the classroom or laboratory.

The origins of this book are a sharp clash of cultures between how I do things at the Media Lab and how things are done elsewhere in the world. For example, when I created the Media Lab Asia as a distributed organization across several universities in India, one of the biggest problems I encountered was that researchers at each university were isolated from one another and therefore their research was stagnant and unproductive. People working in the same field, and sometimes even at the same university, had literally never met each other because the university administrators and the funding agencies thought it was sufficient to have the researchers read each others papers and that they didnt need to travel to meetings or conferences. It was only when they began to meet and spend informal time together that new ideas began to bubble up and new ways of approaching problems began to spread.

I have seen the same lack of understanding in many senior government leaders and CEOs of multinational companies in my role at the World Economic Forum, where I have co-led hyperconnected world discussions that seek solutions to the challenges posed by big data and specifically the uncontrolled spread of private personal information. It has become clear to me that there is a huge difference between the way most world leaders and CEOs think about innovation and collective action and the examples I see from my perch at MIT. Most people think in relatively static terms, such as competition, rules, and (sometimes) complexity. I think in more dynamic, evolutionary terms, paying attention to the flow of ideas within networks, the creation of social norms, and the processes that generate complexity. Most people think about using a framework centered on the individual and the eventual steady-state outcome, whereas I think in terms of social physics: growth processes within networks.

To understand this difference in thinking, I began a decade-long research program to develop a rigorous intellectual framework that extends current individual-centric economic and policy thinking by including social interactions. It posits social learning and social pressure as primary forces that drive the evolution of culture and govern much of the hyperconnected world. This research program has been surprisingly successful from an academic perspective, with each part of the social physics framework being mapped out in papers published in the worlds most selective scientific journals. My expectation is that these papers will provide additional depth to the fields of complexity and network science, as well as provide a new view on evolutionary dynamics.

But as we all know, academic papers are, well, academic. So Ive also helped move these ideas out into the real world, creating half a dozen start-up companies that use them to help firms become more productive and creative, to make the mobile social Web smarter, to make it possible for the average person to be a successful investor, and to help support the social and mental health of our society. Again, these real-world endeavors have been surprisingly successful, in no small part because of the talented and visionary former students who have become the CEOs of these companies.

This book marks the launch of a larger discussion. The goal is to get the language of social physics into general use, where it can provide much needed nuance to the traditional language of market competition and regulation. In a world of hyperconnectivity, where social dynamics are such an important determinant of outcomes, a better understanding of social physics has become critical.

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