influence,network,and public opinion formation
public opinion formation
Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation
Journal of Consumer Research (in press, Dec. 2007)
Duncan J. Watts1
Peter Sheridan Dodds2
1Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10025
().
2Department of mathematics and statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington VT, 05404 ().
A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials—a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influentials hypothesis,” using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials, but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires
more careful specification and testing than it has received.
