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Abstract:
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The lay public often thinks that new ideas and practices spread contagiously, like an infectious disease. There are several differences, however, in how ideas and practices spread in a network compared to how diseases spread. At the same time there are several similarities. This paper explores how diffusion of innovations principles and findings can be used to understand the ways in which behavior and diseases spread (or contagion) are similar and different and how findings from empirical studies converge and diverge in important ways. We consider factors such as source infectivity and susceptibility, individual thresholds, horizons of observability, concurrency, and other concepts that have proven useful for understanding network influences on behavior and disease.
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