Damon Centola

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Damon Centola is an American sociologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the Elihu Katz Chair of Communication, Sociology and Engineering. He directs the Network Dynamics Group and is a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

Born in Philadelphia in 1973, Centola studied at Marlboro College (B.A.), Tufts University (M.A.), and Cornell University (Ph.D., 2006). His Ph.D. work focused on complex contagions—the way behaviors spread through networks, requiring multiple confirmations from different people.

Career highlights
- Centola has taught at MIT Sloan School of Management (2008–2013) and was a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University before moving to Penn in 2013.
- At Penn, he founded the Network Dynamics Group to explore how social networks shape behavior and policy.

Key ideas and contributions
- Complex contagions: Together with Michael Macy, Centola showed that diseases and simple information can spread through “short” connections easily, but behaviors often spread only when people receive reinforcement from multiple sources. This work builds on Granovetter’s ideas about weak ties and small-world networks, showing that weak ties help with simple contagions but can slow complex ones. He also demonstrated these ideas through network-based experiments.
- Experimental sociology: Centola pioneered large-scale online network experiments to study social change. In the Health Lifestyle Network (Harvard, 2010), he showed that network structure can causally influence how far and how fast an innovation spreads. Subsequent work tested the roles of homophily, social norms, and structural diversity in spreading health behaviors.
- Collective intelligence: In 2017, Centola and colleagues found that decentralized networks—where everyone has similar influence—often yield more accurate group judgments than centralized networks, which can be thrown off by a single highly connected individual. Later studies showed this improvement persists even when participants hold partisan biases.
- Norms and tipping points: In 2015, he and Andrea Baronchelli showed that online network structure can steer how a social norm emerges. In 2018, their work predicted and demonstrated a tipping point: when about 25% of the group adopts a new norm, a committed minority can trigger rapid, widespread change.

Awards and honors
- American Sociological Association (ASA) James Coleman Award for Outstanding Article (2017).
- Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Computational Social Science (2018).
- ASA awards for Outstanding Article in Mathematical Sociology (2006, 2009, 2011) and the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology (2011).

Selected impact
Centola’s research has shaped how scientists think about how ideas and behaviors spread through networks, showing that network design matters for health campaigns, collective problem-solving, and the speed of social change. His work spans theory, experiments, and real-world implications for how to foster positive social outcomes.