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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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Aral, Sinan, Nicolaides, Christos
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2017
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.
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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
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