Researchers use Facebook to dispel notion that social contagion is like biological contagion
(PhysOrg.com) -- Historically, diseases tend to spread most quickly when introduced into a crowded environment. The more neighbors there are, the more easily viruses can hop from person to person. More recently, the same sort of language has been used to describe how social ideas and adoption spreads. Facebook for example, has been described as spreading like a disease. Now however, researchers from Cornell University have shown that users adopting Facebook, tend to do so more predictably when receiving invitations from multiple sources, rather than a lot of requests from members of the same group, which implies that Facebook and its growth, does not actually compare with biological contagion at all. They have published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.