Duncan J Watts
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3793205 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Duncan J Watts |
| PRENOMES | Duncan J |
| SOBRENOME | Watts |
| ASSINATURA | WATTS D J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Microsoft Research (United Kingdom) |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5005-4961 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 983 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1998 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
A research agenda for encouraging prosocial behaviour on social media
Integrating explanation and prediction in computational social science
Comparing Estimates of News Consumption from Survey and Passively Collected Behavioral Data
Surveys are a vital tool for understanding public opinion and knowledge, but they can also yield biased estimates of behavior. Here we explore a popular and important behavior that is frequently measured in public opinion surveys: news consumption. Previous studies have shown that television news consumption is consistently overreported in surveys relative to passively collected behavioral data. We validate these earlier findings, showing that th…
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration
How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly…
Predicting history
Small Worlds
Small Worlds
Prediction and explanation in social systems
Historically, social scientists have sought out explanations of human and social phenomena that provide interpretable causal mechanisms, while often ignoring their predictive accuracy. We argue that the increasingly computational nature of social science is beginning to reverse this traditional bias against prediction; however, it has also highlighted three important issues that require resolution. First, current practices for evaluating predicti…
Response to Turco and Zuckerman’s “Verstehen for Sociology
Should social science be more solution-oriented
Redefine statistical significance
Le sens commun et les explications sociologiques
The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion
Viral products and ideas are intuitively understood to grow through a person-to-person diffusion process analogous to the spread of an infectious disease; however, until recently it has been prohibitively difficult to directly observe purportedly viral events, and thus to rigorously quantify or characterize their structural properties. Here we propose a formal measure of what we label “structural virality” that interpolates between two conceptual…
Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi
Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups that subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising seem to answer "yes, " pointing to solidarity among groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue that two mechanisms with differing implications may generate this observed outcome: "influence" (change in att…
Rejoinder to Lewis
In a response to our article “Political Ideology and Racial Preferences in Online Dating,” Kevin Lewis (2015) has raised concerns about various aspects of our analysis of user behavior on a national online dating site. The core of Lewis’ critique is that we do not report specifics of the sample, the website, and the analysis. Lewis also details numerous smaller points with respect to details of the analysis. The goal of this response is not to re…
Political Ideology and Racial Preferences in Online Dating
What explains the relative persistence of same-race romantic relationships? One possible explanation is structural--this phenomenon could reflect the fact that social interactions are already stratified along racial lines--while another attributes these patterns to individual-level preferences. We present novel evidence from an online dating community involving more than 250,000 people in the United States about the frequency with which individua…
Common Sense and Sociological Explanations
Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreover, this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action, that is, for why people do what they do. Many such explanations, it is argued, conflate understandability with causality in ways tha…
Social Influence
This article examines the role of social influence in the puzzling nature of success in cultural markets: successful cultural products, such as hit songs, best-selling books, and blockbuster movies, are considerably more successful than average; yet which particular songs, books, and movies will become the next ‘big thing’ appears impossible to predict. The article investigates this paradox empirically by constructing a website where more than 27…
Network Dynamics
This article explores dynamic networks and diffusion, with particular emphasis on evolving traces of enacted social relations. It begins with a review of models for the evolution of networks over time — making a distinction between ‘node-based’ and ‘edge-based’ models — and more specifically how and why networks change. It then considers how network timing affects the flow of things across networks, focusing on how edge timing reshapes the set of…
Network Robustness and Fragility
Who says what to whom on twitter
We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter known as "lists" to distinguish between elite users - by which we mean celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations - and ordinary users. Based on this…
Everyone's an influencer
In this paper we investigate the attributes and relative influence of 1.6M Twitter users by tracking 74 million diffusion events that took place on the Twitter follower graph over a two month interval in 2009. Unsurprisingly, we find that the largest cascades tend to be generated by users who have been influential in the past and who have a large number of followers. We also find that URLs that were rated more interesting and/or elicited more pos…
A simple model of global cascades on random networks
The origin of large but rare cascades that are triggered by small initial shocks is a phenomenon that manifests itself as diversely as cultural fads, collective action, the diffusion of norms and innovations, and cascading failures in infrastructure and organizational networks.This paper presents a possible explanation of this phenomenon in terms of a sparse, random network of interacting agents whose decisions are determined by the actions of th…
Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks
The Structure and Dynamics of Networks
From the Internet to networks of friendship, disease transmission, and even terrorism, the concept--and the reality--of networks has come to pervade modern society. But what exactly is a network? What different types of networks are there? Why are they interesting, and what can they tell us? In recent years, scientists from a range of fields--including mathematics, physics, computer science, sociology, and biology--have been pursuing these questi…
Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation
A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials-a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers-are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the "influentials hypothesis," using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by inf…
The 'New' Science of Networks
In recent years, the analysis and modeling of networks, and also networked dynamical systems, have been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary interest, yielding several hundred papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, economics, and sociology journals ( Newman 2003c ), as well as a number of books ( Barabasi 2002 , Buchanan 2002 , Watts 2003 ). Here I review the major findings of this emerging field and discuss briefly t…
Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon
The small-world phenomenon formalized in this article as the coincidence of high local clustering and short global separation, is shown to be a general feature of sparse, decentralized networks that are neither completely ordered nor completely random. Networks of this kind have received little attention, yet they appear to be widespread in the social and natural sciences, as is indicated here by three distinct examples. Furthermore, small admixt…
Origins of Homophily in an Evolving Social Network
The authors investigate the origins of homophily in a large university community, using network data in which interactions, attributes, and affiliations are all recorded over time. The analysis indicates that highly similar pairs do show greater than average propensity to form new ties; however, it also finds that tie formation is heavily biased by triadic closure and focal closure, which effectively constrain the opportunities among which indivi…
Redefine statistical significance
The Structure and Dynamics of Networks
From the Internet to networks of friendship, disease transmission, and even terrorism, the concept--and the reality--of networks has come to pervade modern society. But what exactly is a network? What different types of networks are there? Why are they interesting, and what can they tell us? In recent years, scientists from a range of fields--including mathematics, physics, computer science, sociology, and biology--have been pursuing these questi…
Real and perceived attitude agreement in social networks
It is often asserted that friends and acquaintances have more similar beliefs and attitudes than do strangers; yet empirical studies disagree over exactly how much diversity of opinion exists within local social networks and, relatedly, how much awareness individuals have of their neighbors' views. This article reports results from a network survey, conducted on the Facebook social networking platform, in which participants were asked about their…
Leading the Herd Astray
Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a "self-fulfilling prophecy"? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online "music market," in which 12,207 participants listened to and downloaded songs by unknown bands. We found that most songs experienced self-fulfillin…
Common Sense and Sociological Explanations
Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreover, this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action, that is, for why people do what they do. Many such explanations, it is argued, conflate understandability with causality in ways tha…
Should social science be more solution-oriented
Political Ideology and Racial Preferences in Online Dating
What explains the relative persistence of same-race romantic relationships? One possible explanation is structural--this phenomenon could reflect the fact that social interactions are already stratified along racial lines--while another attributes these patterns to individual-level preferences. We present novel evidence from an online dating community involving more than 250,000 people in the United States about the frequency with which individua…
Comparing Estimates of News Consumption from Survey and Passively Collected Behavioral Data
Surveys are a vital tool for understanding public opinion and knowledge, but they can also yield biased estimates of behavior. Here we explore a popular and important behavior that is frequently measured in public opinion surveys: news consumption. Previous studies have shown that television news consumption is consistently overreported in surveys relative to passively collected behavioral data. We validate these earlier findings, showing that th…
Social Influence, Binary Decisions and Collective Dynamics
In this paper we address the general question of how social influence determines collective outcomes for large populations of individuals faced with binary decisions. First, we define conditions under which the behavior of individuals making binary decisions can be described in terms of what we call an influence-response function: a one-dimensional function of the (weighted) number of individuals choosing each of the alternatives. And second, we …
Small Worlds
Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi
Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups that subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising seem to answer "yes, " pointing to solidarity among groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue that two mechanisms with differing implications may generate this observed outcome: "influence" (change in att…
Response to Turco and Zuckerman’s “Verstehen for Sociology
Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks
Small Worlds
An Overview of the Small-World Phenomenon
Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon
The small-world phenomenon formalized in this article as the coincidence of high local clustering and short global separation, is shown to be a general feature of sparse, decentralized networks that are neither completely ordered nor completely random. Networks of this kind have received little attention, yet they appear to be widespread in the social and natural sciences, as is indicated here by three distinct examples. Furthermore, small admixt…
Network Robustness and Fragility
Recent work on the Internet, social networks, and the power grid has addressed the resilience of these networks to either random or targeted deletion of network nodes or links. Such deletions include, for example, the failure of Internet routers or power transmission lines. Percolation models on random graphs provide a simple representation of this process but have typically been limited to graphs with Poisson degree distribution at their vertice…
Random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions and their applications
Recent work on the structure of social networks and the internet has focused attention on graphs with distributions of vertex degree that are significantly different from the Poisson degree distributions that have been widely studied in the past. In this paper we develop in detail the theory of random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions. In addition to simple undirected, unipartite graphs, we examine the properties of directed and bipartit…
Small Worlds
A simple model of global cascades on random networks
The origin of large but rare cascades that are triggered by small initial shocks is a phenomenon that manifests itself as diversely as cultural fads, collective action, the diffusion of norms and innovations, and cascading failures in infrastructure and organizational networks. This paper presents a possible explanation of this phenomenon in terms of a sparse, random network of interacting agents whose decisions are determined by the actions of t…
Random graph models of social networks
We describe some new exactly solvable models of the structure of social networks, based on random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions. We give models both for simple unipartite networks, such as acquaintance networks, and bipartite networks, such as affiliation networks. We compare the predictions of our models to data for a number of real-world social networks and find that in some cases, the models are in remarkable agreement with the da…
An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks
We report on a global social-search experiment in which more than 60,000 e-mail users attempted to reach one of 18 target persons in 13 countries by forwarding messages to acquaintances. We find that successful social search is conducted primarily through intermediate to weak strength ties, does not require highly connected “hubs” to succeed, and, in contrast to unsuccessful social search, disproportionately relies on professional relationships. …
The 'New' Science of Networks
In recent years, the analysis and modeling of networks, and also networked dynamical systems, have been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary interest, yielding several hundred papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, economics, and sociology journals ( Newman 2003c ), as well as a number of books ( Barabasi 2002 , Buchanan 2002 , Watts 2003 ). Here I review the major findings of this emerging field and discuss briefly t…
Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network
Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals' attributes, and by the closure of short network cycles. We analyzed a dynamic social network comprising 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university, in which interactions between individuals are inferred from time-stamped e-mail headers recorded over one academic year and are matched with affiliations an…
The Collective Dynamics of Belief
Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation
A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials-a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers-are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the "influentials hypothesis," using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by inf…
Leading the Herd Astray
Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a "self-fulfilling prophecy"? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online "music market," in which 12,207 participants listened to and downloaded songs by unknown bands. We found that most songs experienced self-fulfillin…
Social Influence, Binary Decisions and Collective Dynamics
In this paper we address the general question of how social influence determines collective outcomes for large populations of individuals faced with binary decisions. First, we define conditions under which the behavior of individuals making binary decisions can be described in terms of what we call an influence-response function: a one-dimensional function of the (weighted) number of individuals choosing each of the alternatives. And second, we …
Origins of Homophily in an Evolving Social Network
The authors investigate the origins of homophily in a large university community, using network data in which interactions, attributes, and affiliations are all recorded over time. The analysis indicates that highly similar pairs do show greater than average propensity to form new ties; however, it also finds that tie formation is heavily biased by triadic closure and focal closure, which effectively constrain the opportunities among which indivi…
Predicting consumer behavior with Web search
Recent work has demonstrated that Web search volume can “predict the present,” meaning that it can be used to accurately track outcomes such as unemployment levels, auto and home sales, and disease prevalence in near real time. Here we show that what consumers are searching for online can also predict their collective future behavior days or even weeks in advance. Specifically we use search query volume to forecast the opening weekend box-office …
Real and perceived attitude agreement in social networks
It is often asserted that friends and acquaintances have more similar beliefs and attitudes than do strangers; yet empirical studies disagree over exactly how much diversity of opinion exists within local social networks and, relatedly, how much awareness individuals have of their neighbors' views. This article reports results from a network survey, conducted on the Facebook social networking platform, in which participants were asked about their…
Social Influence
This article examines the role of social influence in the puzzling nature of success in cultural markets: successful cultural products, such as hit songs, best-selling books, and blockbuster movies, are considerably more successful than average; yet which particular songs, books, and movies will become the next ‘big thing’ appears impossible to predict. The article investigates this paradox empirically by constructing a website where more than 27…
Network Dynamics
This article explores dynamic networks and diffusion, with particular emphasis on evolving traces of enacted social relations. It begins with a review of models for the evolution of networks over time — making a distinction between ‘node-based’ and ‘edge-based’ models — and more specifically how and why networks change. It then considers how network timing affects the flow of things across networks, focusing on how edge timing reshapes the set of…
Network Robustness and Fragility
Who says what to whom on twitter
We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter known as "lists" to distinguish between elite users - by which we mean celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations - and ordinary users. Based on this…
Everyone's an influencer
In this paper we investigate the attributes and relative influence of 1.6M Twitter users by tracking 74 million diffusion events that took place on the Twitter follower graph over a two month interval in 2009. Unsurprisingly, we find that the largest cascades tend to be generated by users who have been influential in the past and who have a large number of followers. We also find that URLs that were rated more interesting and/or elicited more pos…
A simple model of global cascades on random networks
The origin of large but rare cascades that are triggered by small initial shocks is a phenomenon that manifests itself as diversely as cultural fads, collective action, the diffusion of norms and innovations, and cascading failures in infrastructure and organizational networks.This paper presents a possible explanation of this phenomenon in terms of a sparse, random network of interacting agents whose decisions are determined by the actions of th…
Computer Science (36 obras) · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence (23 obras) · Complex Network Analysis Techniques (16 obras) · Mathematics (16 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Social Psychology (13 obras) · Physics (12 obras) · Theoretical Computer Science (10 obras) · World Wide Web (10 obras)