The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation
Abstract
A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials—a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influentials hypothesis,” using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires more careful specification and testing than it has received.
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Cites
Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications
Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511815478 · Cited by 17,557
Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity
Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.142015 · Cited by 6,077
Audit and feedback: effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes
Ivers, N., Jamtvedt, G., Flottorp, S., Young, J. M., Odgaard-Jensen, J., French, S. D., O'Brien, M. A., Johansen, M., Grimshaw, J., & Oxman, A. D. (2012) · Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews · doi:10.1002/14651858.cd000259.pub3 · Cited by 5,485
Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market
Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1121066 · Cited by 2,231 · cited 1×
“Thus, whatever influence these individuals exert on the collective outcome is an accidental consequence of their randomly assigned position in the queue—a result that has been demonstrated recently for more complicated and realistic scenarios as well (Salganik et al. 2006).”
BackgroundSelf-citationLocal opinion leaders: effects on professional practice and health care outcomes
Flodgren, G., Parmelli, E., Doumit, G., Gattellari, M., O'Brien, M. A., Grimshaw, J., & Eccles, M. P. (2011) · Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews · doi:10.1002/14651858.cd000125.pub4 · Cited by 1,070
The role set: problems in sociological theory
Merton, R. K. (1957) · The British Journal of Sociology · doi:10.2307/587363 · Cited by 947
Kelly, J. A., St Lawrence, J. S., Diaz, Y. E., Stevenson, L. Y., Hauth, A. C., Brasfield, T. L., Kalichman, S. C., Smith, J. E., & Andrew, M. E. (1991) · American Journal of Public Health · doi:10.2105/ajph.81.2.168 · Cited by 736 · cited 2×
“…appear in fields as diverse as marketing (Chan and Misra 1990; Coulter et al. 2002; Van den Bulte and Joshi 2007), public health (Doumit et al. 2007; Kelly et al. 1991; Moore et al. 2004, 189; Soumerai et al. 1998, 1358), and political behavior (Nisbet 2006; Roch 2005), as well as being featured…”
BackgroundSoumerai, S. B., McLaughlin, T. J., Gurwitz, J. H., Guadagnoli, E., Hauptman, P. J., Borbas, C., Morris, N., McLaughlin, B., Gao, X., Willison, D. J., et al. (1998) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.279.17.1358 · Cited by 479
On the uniform generation of random graphs with prescribed degree sequences
Milo, R., Kashtan, N., Itzkovitz, S., Newman, M. E. J., & Alon, U. (2003) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0312028 · Cited by 281
Cited by
Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy
Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., & Gummadi, K. (2010) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v4i1.14033 · Cited by 3,022
De Veirman, M., Cauberghe, V., & Hudders, L. (2017) · International Journal of Advertising · doi:10.1080/02650487.2017.1348035 · Cited by 2,548
Everyone's an influencer: quantifying influence on twitter
Bakshy, E., Hofman, J. M., Mason, W. A., & Watts, D. J. (2011) · Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining · doi:10.1145/1935826.1935845 · Cited by 1,689
Self-citationDigital marketing: a framework, review, and research agenda
Kannan, P. K., & Li, H. “. (2017) · International Journal of Research in Marketing · doi:10.1016/j.ijresmar.2016.11.006 · Cited by 1,707
Lamberton, C., & Stephen, A. T. (2016) · Journal of Marketing · doi:10.1509/jm.15.0415 · Cited by 1,127
Metadata
- Authors
- Watts, D. J., & Dodds, P. S.
- Venue
- Journal of Consumer Research
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2007-12
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 441-458
- ISSN
- 0093-5301 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5277
- OpenAlex
- W2150375325
- Cited by
- 1,875
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 37.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
