Damon Centola, Ph.D.
- Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering
- Director, Network Dynamics Group
- Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
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 and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
Damon's research centers on social networks, collective intelligence, and behavior change. His work has received numerous scientific awards, including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.
Popular accounts of Damon's work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and CNN, among other outlets. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Per Bak Capital Partners, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation. Damon's speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Apple, Cigna, General Motors, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry's, the U.S. Army, and the NBA, among others. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (PUP 2018) and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little, Brown Spark 2021). His forthcoming book is Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence (MIT Press / Penguin Random House, October 2026).
Education
- B.A., Marlboro College, 1997
- M.A., Cornell University, 2004
- Ph.D., Cornell University, 2006
Selected Publications
Change: How to Make Big Things Happen. Little, Brown & Co., 2021.
How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagion. Princeton University Press, 2018.
Courses
- COMM 2410 Understanding Communication Networks via Web Based Experiments
- COMM 4590 Social Networks and the Spread of Behavior
- COMM 5530 Research Seminar on Computational Social Science
- COMM 7880 Research Seminar on Internet Experiments
- COMM 7950 The “New” Science of Collective Intelligence
- COMM 8580 CHANGE: Networks and Policy
Social Networks Outsmart Cognitive Biases
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Damon Centola on Video
Professor Damon Centola explains how putting clinicians into structured networks can help reduce medical bias against women and minorities.
Social influencers are unlikely to change a person’s behavior by example. To stimulate a shift in people’s thinking, target small groups of people in the outer edge or fringe of a network.
Centola talks about his new book, "Change: The Power in the Periphery to Make Big Things Happen," a scientific exploration of how beliefs, behaviors, and ideas spread through social networks.
Social media networks, which often foster partisan antagonism, may also help reduce political polarization, finds research by Damon Centola in PNAS.
In his book, "How Behavior Spreads," Damon Centola explains that contrary to the idea that everything "goes viral," behaviors spread differently than viruses do.
Research by Damon Centola finds that when 25% of people in a group adopt a new social norm, it creates a tipping point where the entire group follows suit.
When people talk to each other, together they can make smarter decisions than they can on their own, explains Damon Centola in a PNAS study.
When looking at how exercise programs motivate people to hit the gym, competition provided much more effective motivation than did social support.
Research by Damon Centola finds that the social influence of online peers can be highly effective in encouraging people to exercise more.
Research by Damon Centola used a Web-based game to help explain how social conventions can emerge freely in populations.