Social Physics

Where do ideas come from? How do they get put into action? How can we create social structures that are productive and creative? If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries that have become the bedrock of a new scientific field: social physics. This revolutionary science shows that innovation doesn’t come from a few exceptionally bright people, but from the flow of ideas — especially how our social networks spread ideas and turn those ideas into behaviours. Thanks to the rise of smartphones, GPS devices, and the internet, Pentland and his teams can study patterns of information exchange in a social network, without any knowledge of the content of the information. Using this data, they can tell with stunning accuracy how effective that network is, whether it’s a business or an entire city. Pentland shows us how to fine-tune these networks to improve their performance — for instance, by maximising a group’s collective intelligence, or by using social incentives to work through disruptive change. Social Physics will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work — and can be made to work better, at every level of society. It is an entirely new way to look at life itself.