Exercise contagion in a global social network
Name
Exercise contagion.pdf
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1.06 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Aral, Sinan K
Nicolaides, Christos
Date Issued
April 2017
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Aral, Sinan and Nicolaides, Christos. “Exercise Contagion in a Global Social Network.” Nature Communications 8 (April 2017): 14753 © 2017 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14753
