Title | Bridging behavioral experiments and network dynamics to inform interventions for social change

Abstract |  Addressing global challenges – from public health to climate change – often involves stimulating the large-scale adoption of new products or behaviours. Traditional research on individual decision-making emphasizes understanding the cognitive and contextual drivers of adoption, while computational diffusion models rooted in network science focus on how new behaviours spread in social networks. The integration of these two perspectives – although advocated by several research communities – remains an open challenge. In this talk, I will first introduce the complex contagion theory of social change as a framework for bridging these two traditions. I will then present novel methodologies that integrate behavioural experiments with diffusion models of new behaviour spreading, which enable accurate micro-calibration of spreading simulations. Finally, I will discuss how the obtained theoretical findings informed a recent field experiment on the diffusion of agroforestry in rural Côte d’Ivoire.

Bio | Manuel S. Mariani is an incoming Associate Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest and visiting researcher at the University of Zurich. Trained as a physicist, he works at the intersection of computational social science, network science, and marketing science. His research examines how individual behaviours and collective dynamics co-evolve in complex systems. He is interested in when and how social networks enable bottom-up social change, and how behavioural and network models can inform field interventions for social impact in real-world organizations and developing contexts. His approach combines quantitative methods from behavioural and network sciences with field experiments. His research has been published in diverse journals, including Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, and PNAS.