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...