From one of the world's leading data scientists a landmark tour of the new science of idea
flow offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social
influence If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius it is MIT's Alex Sandy Pentland.
Over years of groundbreaking experiments he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant
enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more
in common with bees than we like to admit: We're social creatures first and foremost. Our most
important habits of action-and most basic notions of common sense-are wired into us through our
coordination in social groups. Social physics is about idea flow the way human social networks
spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors. Thanks to the millions of digital bread
crumbs people leave behind via smartphones GPS devices and the Internet the amount of new
information we have about human activity is truly profound. Until now sociologists have
depended on limited data sets and surveys that tell us how people say they think and behave
rather than what they actually do. As a result we've been stuck with the same stale social
structures-classes markets-and a focus on individual actors data snapshots and steady
states. Pentland shows that in fact humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives
that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve
only their own economic self-interest. Pentland and his teams have found that they can study
patterns of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual
content of the information and predict with stunning accuracy how productive and effective that
network is whether it's a business or an entire city. We can maximize a group's collective
intelligence to improve performance and use social incentives to create new organizations and
guide them through disruptive change in a way that maximizes the good. At every level of
interaction from small groups to large cities social networks can be tuned to increase
exploration and engagement thus vastly improving idea flow. 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. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the most important revolution in
the study of social behavior in a generation an entirely new way to look at life itself.
