Decoding the Social World ─ Data Science and the Unintended Consequences of Communication

In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón shows how algorithms, crowdsourcing, and digital traces offer methods and data that can help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences -- a social paradox that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Communication has always been the force that makes a collection of people more than the sum of individuals. The digital revolution -- which is a continuation of previous technological revolutions -- allows us to parse the information we generate by being social in new, imaginative ways. But we must look at that data, González-Bailón argues, through the lens of theories that capture the nature of social life. The technologies we use, in the end, are also a manifestation of the social world we inhabit.

González-Bailón discusses how the unpredictability of social life relates to networks, social influence, and the unintended effects that derive from interdependent decisions. She describes how communication generates social dynamics in aggregate (leading to episodes of "collective effervescence") and explains the mechanisms that underlie large-scale diffusion, when information and behavior spread "like wildfire." She explains how network theory can be used to analyze the relationship between individual decisions and collective outcomes, and why communication can rewire the networks that constrain and facilitate social life. By opening the black box of unintended effects, González-Bailón finds a starting point for devising strategies for social intervention. Finally, she explores the policy implications of digital research, considering, among other things, how data science and evidence-based research can enrich critical thinking and decision making.