Three degrees of separation: The mathematics of (real) social networks

Brian Carruthers

Social networks are governed by some unexpected factors, including the genes of people you’ve never met, says Yale University’s Professor Nicholas Christakis, whose research has explored three different types of “social contagion”.

In a little over ten years, Facebook has become a global phenomenon, connecting people digitally all over the world and generating huge amounts of money for its founder. But there’s more to social networks than digital algorithms – they go back to the beginnings of human history. The structure of social networks today is indistinguishable from that of 10,000 years ago, according to Nicholas Christakis, Sol Goldman family professor of social and natural science, internal medicine and biomedical engineering at Yale University.

And, he told the annual Nudgestock conference on behavioural science (Folkestone, June 2018), there is a significant element...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands