Home / Lectures / Daniel DellaPosta, Penn State University

The Weakness of Strong Expectations: Diffusion and the Self-Defeating Prophecy

Daniel DellaPosta Headshot

Daniel DellaPosta, Penn State University

Description

Semester:

  • Winter 2022

Speakers:

Daniel DellaPosta

Lecture Time:

Fri, March 18, 2022 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm

Lecture Location:

R0220, Ross building

Speaker Webpage(s):

https://www.danieldellaposta.com/

Introduced By:

Sukanya Roy

Abstract

New innovations, practices, and behaviors often spread through diffusion processes in which earlier adopters influence later adopters. However, research on diffusion has a well-documented success bias — cases in which a new innovation successfully spreads through a population or organizational field garner more attention and theorizing than the countless other cases in which similar innovations fail to take off. The same theories and models that account for successful diffusion often become cumbersome when tasked with explaining failed diffusion, an outcome that is at least equally common. In this talk, I will present results from a theoretically-informed computational model of organizational behavior to argue that failed diffusion need not be more mysterious than successful diffusion. In fact, both outcomes may reflect the same underlying mechanisms rooted in how actors form social expectations for how others will behave. Organizations interpret their peers’ decisions to adopt or reject a new innovation in light of their own socially formed expectations, with unsurprising decisions having less impact than conspicuous surprises. Consequently, successive adoptions of a new innovation reinforce its spread while also paradoxically making its continued diffusion more susceptible to disruptions that can make a previously growing “bandwagon” suddenly and unexpectedly collapse. These dynamics make the spread of new innovations noisy and unpredictable because the same innovation facing identical initial conditions can diffuse widely in some cases but fail to launch in others. While we often think of institutionalized expectations as making the social world more predictable, the opposite also holds—widely-believed prophecies can be self-defeating as well as self-fulfilling.

Recording & Additional Notes

Daniel DellaPosta is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Data Analytics at the Department of Sociology and Criminology, Penn State University. He studies network dynamics in political, economic, and organizational contexts. Most broadly, his research focuses on how interdependent actors collectively shape social structure. Daniel is especially interested in how networks shape—and are shaped by—social expectations, norms, and attitudes. He works with data from historical sources, surveys, and the web using a combination of network analysis, statistical modeling, and computational methods. While addressing diverse empirical and theoretical puzzles, his research features a core focus on the mechanisms giving rise to intergroup cooperation and conflict, political and attitudinal alignments, and economic organization. In 2021 he received the Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article from the ASA Culture Section and the Roy C. Buck Award for best published article in the social sciences by an untenured faculty member from the Penn State University.