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Exercise contagion in a global social network
We leveraged exogenous variation in weather patterns across geographies to identify social contagion in exercise behaviours across a global social network. We estimated these contagion effects by combining daily global weather data, which creates exogenous variation in running among friends, with da...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5399289/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28418379 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14753 |
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author | Aral, Sinan Nicolaides, Christos |
author_facet | Aral, Sinan Nicolaides, Christos |
author_sort | Aral, Sinan |
collection | PubMed |
description | We leveraged exogenous variation in weather patterns across geographies to identify social contagion in exercise behaviours across a global social network. We estimated these contagion effects by combining daily global weather data, which creates exogenous variation in running among friends, with data on the network ties and daily exercise patterns of ∼1.1M individuals who ran over 350M km in a global social network over 5 years. Here we show that exercise is socially contagious and that its contagiousness varies with the relative activity of and gender relationships between friends. Less active runners influence more active runners, but not the reverse. Both men and women influence men, while only women influence other women. While the Embeddedness and Structural Diversity theories of social contagion explain the influence effects we observe, the Complex Contagion theory does not. These results suggest interventions that account for social contagion will spread behaviour change more effectively. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5399289 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-53992892017-05-12 Exercise contagion in a global social network Aral, Sinan Nicolaides, Christos Nat Commun Article We leveraged exogenous variation in weather patterns across geographies to identify social contagion in exercise behaviours across a global social network. We estimated these contagion effects by combining daily global weather data, which creates exogenous variation in running among friends, with data on the network ties and daily exercise patterns of ∼1.1M individuals who ran over 350M km in a global social network over 5 years. Here we show that exercise is socially contagious and that its contagiousness varies with the relative activity of and gender relationships between friends. Less active runners influence more active runners, but not the reverse. Both men and women influence men, while only women influence other women. While the Embeddedness and Structural Diversity theories of social contagion explain the influence effects we observe, the Complex Contagion theory does not. These results suggest interventions that account for social contagion will spread behaviour change more effectively. Nature Publishing Group 2017-04-18 /pmc/articles/PMC5399289/ /pubmed/28418379 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14753 Text en Copyright © 2017, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Aral, Sinan Nicolaides, Christos Exercise contagion in a global social network |
title | Exercise contagion in a global social network |
title_full | Exercise contagion in a global social network |
title_fullStr | Exercise contagion in a global social network |
title_full_unstemmed | Exercise contagion in a global social network |
title_short | Exercise contagion in a global social network |
title_sort | exercise contagion in a global social network |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5399289/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28418379 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14753 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT aralsinan exercisecontagioninaglobalsocialnetwork AT nicolaideschristos exercisecontagioninaglobalsocialnetwork |