Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group. He is also a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Author of two books, most recently Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, his research centers on social networks and behavior change.
by Betsy Levy Paluck, Damon Centola
Compendium
May 15, 2022The rational choice model has come under heavy criticism, and the shift has been to say that, if people aren’t rational, there must be something more generally cognitive going on that we can define as “behavioristic” and address through “nudges.” There are unconscious biases and heuristics we can seek to understand which will then tell us how people will act.