Philosophers Michael Brownstein (CASBS fellow 2019-20) and Dan Kelly (2018-19), two of the coauthors of "Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Create Social Change," discuss their book's framing and key concepts with Damon Centola (2014-15), an expert in social network dynamics. The book offers a pragmatic guide for connecting individuals to their role as change agents, illuminating the social feedback processes through which structures, individuals, and social movements interact, unlocking the potential for systemic change.
Philosophers Michael Brownstein (CASBS fellow 2019-20) and Dan Kelly (2018-19), two of the coauthors of "Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Create Social Change," discuss their book's framing and key concepts with Damon Centola (2014-15), an expert in social network dynamics. The book offers a pragmatic guide for connecting individuals to their role as change agents, illuminating the social feedback processes through which structures, individuals, and social movements interact, unlocking the potential for systemic change.
The book is Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (MIT Press, 2025)
Explore the book's website, containing related research, media, more about the authors, and an appendix that provides "A Deeper Dive into Individuals, Structures, and Other Key Concepts"
Michael Brownstein: CUNY Graduate Center webpage | personal webpage | Google Scholar page | CASBS page |
Dan Kelly: Purdue Univ. webpage | personal webpage | Google Scholar page | CASBS page |
Damon Centola: Penn webpage | Network Dynamics Group webpage | Wikipedia page | Google Scholar page | CASBS page |
Other works referenced in this episode:
Alex Madva, Daniel Kelly, Michael Brownstein, "Change the People or Change the Policy? On the Moral Education of Antiracists," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2023)
Michael Brownstein, Daniel Kelly, Alex Madva, "Individualism, Structuralism, and Climate Change," Environmental Communication (2021)
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956) (Wikipedia)
James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966), known as The Coleman Report (Wikipedia)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979 [1984]) (Wikipedia)
Other 2018-19 CASBS fellows who Dan Kelly mentions in this episode: Christopher Bryan, Jennifer Freyd, Ying-hi Hong, Elizabeth Lonsdorf, Ruth Milkman
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Climate Change, Systemic, Economic, and Racial Inequalities, Erosion of Democratic Institutions. Achieving durable progress on big problems like these is hard. Advancing our understanding of their complexities occupies the bandwidth of a great many social and behavioral scientists.
But everyday people often feel detached from academic abstractions and policy wonkiness. They're paralyzed or skeptical about what they can do that will make a tangible difference. Can our efforts as individuals actually help change social systems and structures?
Of course, this is one of the elemental thorny questions of contemporary society. And today on Human Centered, we'll hear about a way forward from Michael Brownstein and Dan Kelly, two of the three authors of the 2025 book, Somebody Should Do Something, How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. Michael is Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Dan is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. Both work at the intersection of philosophy and the social and cognitive sciences, interests that brought Dan to CASBS as a fellow in 2018-19 and Michael to CASBS as a fellow in 2019-20. Somebody Should Do Something doesn't seek to forge a grand narrative of new causal mechanisms, and it moves past well-worn agent versus structure and either-or debates that social theorists have grappled with for nearly a century.
Instead, the book offers a new framing for the general reader. It employs scientifically grounded ideas and offering a pragmatic field guide for connecting individuals to their role as change agents and puts it into practice with concrete case studies. In doing so, the book illuminates the social feedback processes through which structures, individuals, and social movements interact, unlocking the potential for systemic change.
There's a lot in the book's 14 CRISP chapters and we'll provide links for further exploration in the episode notes. Today, Dan and Michael dive into key aspects of their project while in conversation with Damon Centola, a 2014-15 CASBS fellow who is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Damon specializes in social network dynamics and is author of the books, How Behavior Spreads, The Science of Complex Contagions, and Change, How to Make Big Things Happen.
So he's an inspired choice for this episode. As you're about to hear, Damon's deep expertise informs probing questions and propels an interactive and enriching discussion with the authors. Together, they advance our understanding in ways you just don't hear in the typical book talk format you might be familiar with.
Let's jump into the conversation now and you'll discover why.
Damon Centola: So, Dan and Michael, I'm looking forward to talking with you guys about this book. And it's such an interesting book in the sense of it being located in the space of social change, but really differently from a lot of the other books in this sort of space. You really clear at the outset about what the book is not. Right? So it's not a new bit of social science, and it's not you as philosophers arguing with other philosophers about sort of nuances of social change. And it's also not a list of practitioner tools. Like here's some notes from the field.
If I were to take my best guess, and this is from sort of moving into the sort of basic logic you get into when you start the book, it really feels like you're writing to the journalists who have kind of foisted upon us either or dichotomy as kind of a facile way of understanding what people can do or what they should do. And also some of the big picture things that seem overwhelming, like what organizations do or nations do.
And I'm wondering if you were thinking about that when you started writing the book and most importantly, I'm so curious how you made the pitch to MIT for the project.
Michael Brownstein: Thanks, Damon. And thank you for doing this. And it's a good question to start with.
Because I think at different times in the development of the project, we probably would have answered the question differently. So we started off because we had been doing scholarly work on bias and prejudice. Dan and our co-author Alex Madva, who's a philosopher at Cal Poly Pomona, had all been working in that space and been sort of receiving a kind of criticism that understanding racism by looking at the psychology of prejudice and then attempts to sort of reduce prejudice using the tools of psychology was all too individualistic, and in some sense shallow, and in some sense short-sighted.
And so we had been thinking about that problem in the, specifically when it came to bias and prejudice. And we had written about it in scholarly work. And then I would say at some point, roughly around when Dan was at CASBS and then when I was at CASBS, it became clear to us that this was not a criticism that was solely located in discussions about racism and prejudice reduction and so on.
And I had come to CASBS thinking I wanted to develop a new project around climate change and political psychology, but I really didn't know what that was going to be. And there were a lot of twists and turns, but one of the things that became clear to me was that this criticism of being too individualistic in one's responses or one's ideas about how to address the climate crisis was very similar to the argument that we had been seeing when talking about racism. And so we wrote a couple papers, scholarly papers that were sort of specifically located on these topics, but then we got the idea that maybe we would address the topic at a slightly higher level of abstraction, where it wasn't tied to any one issue like climate or racism, or originally the idea for the book was also going to have a third main topic, which was misinformation.
But sort of this broader conversation around individual change and structural change. Your suggestion in the question?
Damon Centola: Just so readers might be interested, the papers that are the change the people or change the policy, is that one of those papers? And individuals and structuralism and climate change?
Michael Brownstein: Yeah, that's right. So those are the two that the three of us all co-authored. We have some others that go back in time a little bit farther, that Alex has some on his own, and then Alex and I had collaborated on a couple.
The three of us really kind of, and I should say, I mean, Dan can describe it better than I can, but I feel like if it's fair to say, Dan, you were kind of like working on this question, both when it came to race and prejudice, but also developing your own stuff on social norms, which I think kind of coalesced. But anyway, those were the two papers. And what I was just going to say before, Damon, was that you asked, like, was the pitch that we needed to argue with journalists?
And I think I would say there were more than just journalists, but journalists were one of the groups that we wanted to argue with. And in fact, I think one of the things we had to figure out in the beginning was, like, how do we portion out the different people we want to argue with? Because what we were seeing was, it wasn't just journalists who are saying, don't worry about individual change, just change the system.
We were seeing that in scholarly work, you know, as reflected in those papers you just mentioned. So political scientists saying some version of it, psychologists often in response to criticism they got about doing anti-bias work were saying similar things. But also we were just seeing it, like, out there in the world of roughly speaking liberal progressive politics.
So we have stories and quotes in the book of activist groups, you know, the Sunrise Movement and so on, kind of picking up on this moment in, on the political left of saying, like we need to stop fretting about our individual choices and focus on structural change. So I think, I think we tried to pitch it ultimately as intervening on a cultural moment in, in political conversation.
Damon Centola: Based on Michael, based on what you were just saying, I had seen something interesting that's really related in my own work on, on bias, which is medical bias. But that one of the, one of the key results that motivated a lot of the work that sociologists do on this was that they were doing these individual bias trainings and the physicians were coming out of the trainings with these amazing scores and the implicit association test. So they were just like great at taking the test and then they go back into clinical practice and be just as biased as they had been previously.
And so it was almost like a teaching to the test type phenomena. And so this is where there's a lot of harrowing about like, well, then what do you do if people are getting perfect scores? And it's obviously there's some other milieu in which decision making is happening other than test taking.
So I'm going to be interested to hear more about that. And actually building on the theme that you were just talking about, the kind of either or framing, I love the way you start the book by kind of making this feel very real for the reader. And there's a sense in which you talk about the individualistic framing as something that's been handed to us, and in a way kind of shielding organizations from some of their responsibility by marketing an individualistic framing, and a moralistic framing around climate change and other sorts of health responsibility behavior.
And I think that's a really interesting way of getting into the discussion, because these are the examples you lead in with, and it really makes a compelling feeling for the reader that, oh, wait a minute, the will has been pulled over my eyes. I've been told all this sort of moralistic rationale for my behavior, and maybe there's something else going on. And I wonder if, you know, it's not exactly a politics of suspicion, but there's a bit of suspicion about, like, well, why are you thinking this?
Why do you have these moral beliefs? Maybe someone's been teaching them to you, and there's something else behind the sort of story. And I wonder if that's sort of part of the framing here that you're thinking about is sort of pull the curtain back a little bit.
Dan Kelly: Yeah. Thanks for pointing that out. It was something which we always had in mind as we were thinking about how to structure what we wanted to say.
And as we kept thinking about, as you mentioned earlier, who our audience for this book was. And of course, we came out of a particular academic setting thinking about these things, but we also were people in the world. And as we say early in the book, when we're also talking about these individual level moralizing kinds of messages that we persistently get from our culture, we just found ourselves feeling a bit stuck at some point in thinking about what any person ourselves or anyone else could do to make the world a better place or contribute to social change in a morally beneficial direction.
And especially how you can think through that question once you come to grips with the sprawling size of a lot of these problems, and the fact that a lot of the problems really are rooted in different kinds of structures that are set up and those need changing, and what can I possibly do to help overturn car culture? I know how to ride my bike to school, but I don't know how to pass policies that are going to affect the way that the fossil fuel industry goes about its business. Some of the book was also, or at least part of what we were trying to communicate in the book was, we're there with you, typical reader who might pick this up or might who have concerns about racism or misinformation or climate change, and we feel the hopelessness that can build up once you start to understand the nature of structural problems.
Then we also wanted to tell a bit of a story where that hopelessness or that stuck in an individual position, that doesn't just come out of thin air that we live in. The United States is by a lot of metrics one of the most individualistic cultures that the world has ever produced. We have this national ethos of self-reliance and rugged individualism.
The corporations that are contributing to things like climate change and carbon emissions on a scale which no individual can possibly touch, they've crafted their messaging in ways which is explicitly-
Damon Centola: It’s an easy sell for Americans.
Dan Kelly: Yeah. It's like there's such an audience welcoming of this message that, no, it's all about individuals and we have personal responsibility for what we do. These corporations, we can use that to do what I came to think of as these dark arts of corporate PR where things like that.
I remember talking to someone about this when we were writing the book, the very concept of a personal carbon footprint. Whereas think about what that cultural artifact is. It's a way for people who are concerned about the climate crisis and know it's a problem to think about what they can do to help address it or help us make progress on it.
The entire thing is just like taking the scope of possible actions and shrinking it into like, what can I possibly do? I can drive my car less, I can fly less, I can eat less meat. But it's just shaping the entire problem space in the public imagination in a way which is like speaking to and drawing on, but then also kind of weaponizing the very individualistic kinds of thought we have.
So just to tie this back to the beginning, a big part of what we came to understand the book is doing, and what I really liked as we kept evolving our message in these ways, is it's trying to open up our collective moral imagination about how to think about climate change. Because it has been constrained in ways which some of which were unintentional, but some of which were very intentional, and sort of pointing that out and making it explicit was an aferroza. I thought it was a very useful and important first step in doing that, and sort of expanding our moral imagination.
Damon Centola: Yeah. And it's really interesting to bring up those examples in the context of decisions that sometimes are public and sometimes are private. So you can imagine making a decision like, you know, buying an offset for your carbon footprint, but doing it publicly as a way of virtue signaling.
And it's interesting to think about doing that kind of behavior privately, where you're actually like, who are you performing for? And it's you're actually coming to believe that this is your role as an individual is to do this sort of work. Whereas, as something we'll talk about later on, your best work as an individual is often done in the public eye, because that's where you generate sort of reinforcing effects for your behavior.
Dan Kelly: Yeah, we picked that up. And yeah, so once we sort of jump up and down on the idea of a personal carbon footprint, because it's such a perfect crystallization of that. But we have a lot of other stories and examples that we point out in the book.
And once you start to see it, you see it everywhere. So McGruff the crime dog, only you can stop crime. Or Smokey the Bear, who tells us how to prevent forest fires, only you can prevent forest fires.
Like it's taking a problem which you might think has a lot of different dimensions and just foisting the responsibility on to individual people. And this is just, it's shot through the way our culture tends to think about these things. And like you mentioned, it kind of takes a lot of, it shuts down the way we think our own actions have influence on other people and how we can maximize those and how we can amplify those in various ways.
Michael Brownstein: One thing, if I could just add really quickly, that I feel I discovered in the process of doing the research for the book and writing it… cause some of the individualism stuff, I think we came to the project with an appreciation of, but one of the things that at least I felt like I really discovered was that part of what is so insidious about this long history that Dan just described is that it is empowering. Like it gives you a very clear picture about something to do and it takes advantage, I think, of that desire that many people feel, whether to do something in public so they get plaudits from their friends and family or to sort of satisfy internally their own desire to feel good about themselves. It's like a ready-made answer, here's what to do. And I think the ability to take advantage of that is really kind of what makes it dark in my opinion.
Damon Centola: Yeah. Well, I was going to pick up on that theme too. I want to come back in a second, Dan, to whether you were thinking about these topics when you came to CASBS for a year there.
But I do want to extend this theme a little bit because it's there in the book and it's in the foreground at the beginning of the book and it sort of softens as you go. But there is the sense in which, as you point out, the ways in which successful change does happen. Of course, it's by virtue of people doing things, but often doing things in coalitions or in concert with one another that creates sort of a critical mass effect.
It sounds like, again, not to indulge the politics of suspicion too much, but it does sound like there's a sense in which those ways in which people really can be very effective. There's a large literature on social mobilization. These messages are actually saying, don't do that, just do something really private and that'll be good enough.
Do you see that as almost like an antagonistic strategy to reduce the efficacy of social action? Or just an accident of history?
For my money, one of the things I learned a great deal about when I was at CASBS from Ruth Milkman, who's a sociologist there, was about stuff like the history of the labor movement and politicking about the ability to create unions and the different propaganda which goes around with that. So that was, I mean, that was just very eye-opening. We have a little bit about that in the book.
But a lot of that goes on behind the scenes. And then what is very much visible and propagandized and, you know, just woven into the sort of very explicit cultural discourse for us is this stuff, which isn't telling people not to organize. It's just consistently directing their attention to another set of options.
So in some sense, like I think your politics is suspicion. I'm totally on board with that. And it's, but it's done with it. Yeah, like, like Michael said, it's done with a little bit of with not a little bit like considerable deviousness. Like they know, they know not to say don't do this kind of thing because that's not a message which is going to land. The American psyche tends to be counter suggestive in a lot of ways. But if you can just control the conversation or control the way people are even thinking about what they can do, that's one way to do this in a sort of devious dark, dark arts of PR way.
Damon Centola: Yeah, I mean, I do want to move on to other questions, but there is this is such an interesting thread. I do want to ask one further question on it. So I think the term Michael used was insidiousness.
And I guess I'm curious whether you think of that. And what I said initially about about journalists about the fact that journalists seem to be playing into that in a really facile way, where it's such an easy dichotomy to talk about, that they almost force things that aren't naturally conceived of in that dichotomy into that dichotomy. Because journalism likes to conceive of itself as fighting big institutional inequity or unfairness.
And then also almost at the end of every, this I'm sure you're getting this a lot with the book, but as a sociologist of networks, at the end of every interview I do, they say, tell us what a person can do. And the irony is like, well, I just talked to you about social tipping points. Like a person is part of the system for sure, but like that's not what the story is here.
And so I'm curious whether you, and if it's not there, it's not there. But I am curious how you see journalism either maybe being duped by these sorts of institutional stories or actually forcing that either or dichotomy on us because it's just so easy to write about and creates a kind of feeling that's easy to understand, which is the small person against the large institution. Even though it may not be historically true, it's something that creates a great story.
Dan Kelly: I just want to get this on the table first. I would be surprised if there wasn't devious and insidious incentives woven through what especially corporate media does. But I think it's not all devious.
So one of the examples that we use in the book, which has a deeper history and philosophic conversation which runs through Wittgenstein and others. But the image of a duck rabbit which is a famous stimulus from Gestalt Psychology, but we've all seen it in the wild. An image that you can look at and from one aspect or from one angle, it looks like a duck and from another, it looks like a rabbit.
You can't look at the thing and not, you always just sort of see it as a duck. When you do that, certain features of the static image become the foreground, and others get relegated to the background, and if you see it the other way around, then the ones which were in the foreground before become background, and the ones which were in the background become foregrounds. It's a dichotomous flip back and forth.
It's a duck, it's a rabbit. It's a duck, it's a rabbit. That just seems like it's a feature of our perceptual apparatus.
Asking the question of, is the image really a duck or is it really a rabbit? Well, it's a bad question, and the actual facts of the matter are much more interesting. But it's just this natural way that we tend to make simplifying assumptions in our cognition, not always explicitly.
But that just forces to look at things one way or another, which makes focal points jump out. We use that as a much simplified analogy with how we tend to think about social change as well. Social change is much more complicated, it's much more dynamic, but it's very easy to fall into these different camps.
Like what's important? Well, it's the individuals, and that sort of pops out to the fore, and the structures fall into the background as being these static rules of the road or something. Or you can think about the structures, and that seems to push the individuals, maybe not into the background in a literal sense, but they become much less causally important or efficacious, and much less the focal point of theorizing.
So, you know, I'm guessing that the journalists, as you point out, who tend to fall into this, it's either the individuals or the structures. Maybe there's some devious there, but I'm guessing it's just a similar feature of our psychology, that if you think about one, the other one seems to fall into the background.
Damon Centola: It’s an easy cognitive pattern.
Dan Kelly: Exactly, exactly.
Michael Brownstein: Just for the sort of sake of argument, I'll take the other side of this, which is the less devious, less insidious side of it. I don't disagree with anything Dan just said. And I guess I think my view is that for any of the really complex patterns we're talking about right now, or in the book, there's going to be lots of different causes and interweaving sort of interpretations of where they come from.
And so if the question is, why are we sort of persistently given this individualizing message, or why is our attention sort of continually in all these different domains of social life trained on individuals acting alone or just minding their own sort of moral garden, part of that story is definitely that it benefited big businesses. And part of that story is the kind of simplistic framework that makes it easy for journalists to write about, and I'm not trying to undersell either of those contributions. But I do think there is a, I don't know, maybe more charitable interpretation of some important cases where earnest social change entrepreneurs look around and say, where's my biggest bang for the buck?
What can I focus on where I can make a discernible change? And in some ways, this is where I think some of the nudge literature, you know, from former CASBS fellow Richard Baylor and others comes from. And I'm not going to defend all of the nudge literature or anything like that.
But I think if you want to give it kind of the most charitable interpretation, it's out of a cost benefit analysis of where people's resources can have the biggest effect. And so, you know, just to make this concrete, one topic that we've talked about in discussing the book and it only comes up a little bit in the book, but it is in there, is about gun deaths and the United States' problem with gun homicides. And so, you know, you just imagine, like, you are an activist or a policy maker or something and you're in a city like Chicago that has a historic problem with gun homicides.
And you are well aware that the sort of most effective solution to the gun problem is going to involve national legislation. But you're also well aware that given where you are situated and what sort of resources are available to you, your chances of, like, directly affecting national legislation are slim. And so, you hear about some program training people to do bystander intervention or cognitive behavioral therapy to de-escalate the kind of situations that oftentimes give rise to gun deaths.
It's very easy, I think, to, like, look at that and say, well, that's just, like, this individualistic, tweaking-around-the-margins kind of work. It's just low-hanging fruit, and it's not really going to solve the problem. But I guess I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that oftentimes the situation people who really want to make a difference are in is having to figure out what they can actually affect.
And sometimes the calculation they make is not the right one, and we'd have to look issue by issue. But I do think that cost-benefit analysis, coming from a very genuine concern about the constraints around what any person can affect, is part of the calculus that gives rise to this sort of tension. And I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want anyone to hear this conversation and just sort of come away from it thinking that our view, or at least my own view, is just, it's just sort of all insidious PR and it's just a big con job. I think it's more complicated than that.
Damon Centola: Sure, of course. And I also, as a faculty at the Ann Arbor School of Communication, I want to say I love journalists. That's how my best friends are journalists.
So I want to shift this little bit towards some of the social science through the 20th century that kind of touches on this stuff. And I want to see how your thinking interacts with one of the sort of more famous cases. So C. Wright Mills was this prominent sociologist in the early 20th century, and he wrote The Power Elite, largely discussing the sort of forces of wealth and industry and how they sort of control society. But when he tried to describe what sociology is, he defined the sociological imagination as the intersection of history and biography. And so this fights sort of nicely with the theme of how you're thinking it, where history for him is the sort of the massive tectonic forces that have kind of brought us to where we are.
And of course, biography are the idiosyncratic choices that you make, that you feel like make you who you are. And so this has given rise to a century of debate about this idea of structure and agency, where if structures are always guiding individual behavior, how are individuals ever free? And on the other side, look, anything that's ever built at any time ever is built by people.
So people are constantly building institutions and structures. And so when they're creating these institutions, how do they ever maintain stability? Because they're always changing and people are always acting.
So this sort of sets up the two big problems in the field of social science, which is how do we ever get stable social order? And then once it's stable, how does it ever change? And the example I think I mentioned to you guys earlier in the notes was this work by James Coleman, who became a real luminary.
And actually, he was a member of the 1955-56 class at CASBS. It's really CASBS reference out there. And he defined a diagram which has been used for 75 years.
But there are problems with it in some ways. But it's basically a bathtub. And he says, look, there's this boat concept where at the top of the bathtub, there are big structures like Protestantism, and then forces downward to the base of the bathtub state people's values, their beliefs.
Like, you know, if you're a Protestant, you believe that you should seek individual wealth and you should prove your predestination. And that, at the individual level, individuals interacting with individuals, gives rise to economic behavior, things like credit and loaning money and building retail storefronts. And then as that aggregates up, then you get the growth at the top of the bathtub of like major capitalist institutions.
So why this is relevant is I want to bring this into sort of conversation with you're thinking about unintended consequences of well-intentioned policy behaviors. So Coleman believed, much like you do, that when individuals and structures interact, it's important, and that we as thinkers in this space should be doing something. And he was troubled, much like you are, by the problems of racism in this country, in particular racial segregation.
And so he used his mathematical formalisms to develop a solution known as bushing vouchers. And so he pioneered the use of bushing vouchers in Chicago, and it was supposed to be this great way of creating a lot of relationships that wouldn't exist otherwise. Coleman's idea, in short, was, look, there's not going to be a lot of integration in society unless people become friends with each other.
They become friends in school. So put a bunch of kids into integrated schools, they'll become friends, they'll grow up together, they'll move into the same neighborhoods together, they'll have kids together, and in a generation, racial segregation will be gone. Everyone knows the story of how this backfired, right?
It's called white flight. And what happened was there was a sufficient amount of integration in Chicago, and it set some critical key point, which is a social tipping point. White families just fled these neighborhoods.
And so it was a colossal failure of an attempt to bring this sort of scientific idea into the policy domain. And I'm curious in your thinking about the strategies for intervention we might adopt and the ways in which we might integrate people individually to grow changes in collective beliefs and collective behavior. Where your thinking lands on this sort of this kind of massive unintended consequence and how we can sort of prepare for that and manage it.
Michael Brownstein: It's a great question and there's so much in there. So tell me if I missed some part of it or Dan can jump in if he thinks I do. One way to get into it is to back up a little bit and say that a different kind of story about where the book came from for me personally at least was figuring out how to finally make use of my grad school love of Pierre Bourdieu.
And he was like one of my first loves and sort of felt like I never thought about his work again after grad school. But you know now obviously I can see the undercurrent there which is very much connected up with the kind of history of the agency structure debates in social theory.
Damon Centola: You’re talking about distinction, right?
Yeah and his the relationship between habitus and field and what I've now come to think of in terms of kind of the supply and demand of ideas and ideas in this case about social change.
So I mean I would love to hear more about your views on this because I'm by no means an expert on this history but I think one way of describing what we're up to in the book broadly is we definitely don't think we have anything new really to contribute to that century of theorizing about the relationship between agency and structure.
But what we're trying to do is take the idea that there is this deep set of interrelationships and turn it to the question what can I do to make a difference so that's like the question that's on everyone's mind and we sort of felt like we couldn't find a whole lot out there that turns the question from a kind of explanatory project about the relationships between agency and structure into a more pragmatic or forward-looking set of questions about okay so what does it mean for anyone who's out there trying to make a difference.
So I guess I want to say one way of answering the sort of second half of your question and Coleman's work, and where where we see ourselves as doing something similar or doing something different, is and I'm no expert in Coleman's work so you just tell me if I get something wrong here, but I think what what what is a through line throughout the book is that there is no, from our perspective firsts in social change.
So like when when looking at the the Coleman diagram maybe I'm getting something wrong but it looks to me like the sort of posit is that first you start off with these structural concepts, and then a lot happens sort of starting from there. And and what I want to see are the arrows that kind of go back and make it a reciprocal story and and feed back into where you get those structures from and how those structures change over time.
And I again I have nothing at stake in whether this is the right interpretation or criticism of Coleman's work per se but I can flesh it out a little bit with the kind of example that you gave about that comes out of his work on busing and like all kinds of related efforts to deal with segregation.
I think the problematic story that's out there both in scholarly work and journalism and I also just think in people's minds, is that there are some set of solutions whether it's a voucher system or whether it's forced busing or whether it's housing vouchers and we needn't worry about changing any individual heart and minds we needn't worry about prejudice that's living inside anyone's head, because if we just implemented those policies then you would get all these like all the effects that you want all the beneficial stuff would kind of fall out.
And so we have this concept in the book we call it the return of the allegedly irrelevant, which are the prejudices in individuals minds that make it very difficult to implement those structural changes in the first place.
So like why is it that people resist Obamacare? Turns out it's a lot about their racial prejudices. Why is it that people don't successfully take up housing vouchers in order to integrate neighborhoods? There's a lot of complicated answer there, but one part of it is the prejudices of the potential landlords of against people who want to use those vouchers. And so the return of the allegedly irrelevant is in some ways our defense of the ineliminability of psychology.
That understanding bias and prejudice in people's minds is ultimately always going to be part of the story for the kind of policy fixes that have lots of reason kind of going in their favor. So the last thing I'll say is about unintended consequences which is definitely sort of part of the theme of the book. And I guess I just want to frame it as our attempt to be very cautious that there is any sort of simple magical solution like just twist this policy knob or implement this law or whatever and then everything gets fixed.
The history of social change is just so much messier than that. And again to kind of connect the themes, because one of the things that makes it messy is even sort of the best in principle structural changes run up against the wall of prejudice, in-group, out-group, xenophobia, and so on. And so that's why we kind of keep coming back to that throughout the book.
Dan Kelly: Yeah, so I liked the way you were trying to situate what we're doing in the book within sort of this larger picture of the last century of social science. And to pick up on this idea that Michael said where part of what's animating us is a commitment to the idea that psychology is an inalienable part of the story. I would say sort of more broadly, it's not just psychology, like the science of social change needs all of the social sciences, but it needs all of the cognitive sciences as well.
And the way the book ends up being structured is the first, it's cut up into three sections with chapters, smaller chapters within each. The first section of the book is kind of building up this picture of how we've been taught to think about social change, and there's these structures and these individuals, and they're often pitted as being dichotomous options for thinking about how to bring about changes. And then what we do in the second part of the book is try and replace that entrenched picture with what we think is a better one.
And a lot of the materials for that better picture that we're constructing are coming out of the cognitive sciences, the evolutionarily informed work that's been happening recently on human nature and the extremely social character of human minds, and how we're all just sort of like intertwined in ways that we, especially in the individualistic world of the West, that we often just don't appreciate at all. And so my time at CASBS really helped me understand the significance of this. I had tons of conversations with people like Chris Bryant, who's now at the University of Texas, Austin, who's a psychologist, and Ying-hi Hong, who's a psychologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Jennifer Freyd, who's a psychologist at the, she was at the University of Oregon at the time.
But the help me think about social norms and the way that different people can sort of influence those, but the way that we're all, the way that our behavior is all connected and sort of intertwined via the social fabric that runs through all of us. Some of the most interesting conversations, which made it into the book actually from my time at CASBS, were with our resident primatologist, Elizabeth Lonsdorf. She's now at Emory.
And as we're in the book, as we're building this sort of what we think of as a new and better picture of human nature, which is just incredibly social, we're weaving together ideas about relational selves and dialogic identity from a bunch of different traditions. But we're also saying, look, the cognitive and evolutionary sciences is sort of catching up to this picture that different philosophic traditions have been stumping for for a long time. And Elizabeth Lonsdorf was the person who first introduced me to the story that we tell in the book, which comes from Sarah Herdy's book, Mothers and Others.
And it's a thought experiment where she asks, you know, she's on a plane and she's being annoyed by people sort of, you know, bumping into her or being rude in various ways. And she finds herself wondering what it would be like to get on a jet with, instead of 200 other human beings, you know, 200 other primates. And, you know, she's like, none of them would survive the flight.
And being in such close proximity to each other, they just tear each other apart. But we're humans, and we're extremely gregarious, and we have these extremely high levels of social tolerance, and all these norms which regulate how we interact with each other, which allows us to cooperate in these different ways. And that it's a picture of human nature, which we try and build up.
And again, that's not particularly novel, but in drawing on the cognitive and evolutionary sciences to also kind of contribute to our main concerns in the book, the lens that we put on this is, okay, we all kind of, you know, there's a lot of agreement that humans are just extremely susceptible to social influence in all these different ways. But the good news from the point of view of social change is that we're all constantly emitting social influence as well. And we probably don't realize how much and the ways in which we can influence other people's ideas and the way we can influence the sort of decisions they make.
But if we can understand that aspect of ourselves better, we can sort of weaponize, it's not the right word, but harness it in ways which are a little bit more intentional. And just, you know, we can appreciate the fact that we're all natural-born agents of change. It's just very easy to miss that fact.
But if we can think about, if we have a better picture of humans, then I think that can give us a little bit more hope. With respect to our capacity for change. And that's rooted not necessarily in the social sciences, but the ones adjacent to it in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences.
Damon Centola: Yeah. I mean, I think that's the fascinating idea of trying to make this entire literature a little bit more sensitive to cognitive science. I think it's true that a lot of the work that's been done, particularly speaking from my direction, from as a sociologist, we focus primarily on networks, which of course is the sort of effect of interactionism. But there's a lot of kind of technical science on what is the geometry of the network and how does it affect mobilization, or how will that same group of people succeed or fail just based by changes in a topology that's largely invisible to them.
So maybe we can talk about that in the context. You guys had this phrase, I am your situation, or I believe that sometimes you call it situationism. And so I want to think about that a little bit in the context of this new science of networks and computational social science and the way those things have been pursued.
So when we just start is with this idea that I'm influencing you and you're influencing me. So certainly if we have the kind of classic simple contagion model where we're talking about you have the measles and we come to close contact, then I'm going to get the measles. There's not much I can do about it.
And it certainly doesn't matter what the rest of my social network looks like. They're all irrelevant to me getting the measles from you. And then we move into the space of complex contagion and behavior change, things shift a little bit.
So if you now wear a face mask in this 2020, and I have a large social network, none of whom are wearing face masks, then my exposure to you wearing a face mask doesn't necessarily convince me to wear a face mask. In fact, it makes me think that that's sort of a deviant behavior because no one else I know is wearing it. And so I need to have some sort of structural reinforcement from lots of friends to convince me that that behavior is legitimate.
And so in the space of behavior change, it's not just exposure that's at stake, it's this notion of reinforcement and convincement that's at stake. And so I want to unpack that a little bit in terms of how you're thinking about mobilizing processes or influence processes. One of the key pieces of evidence for this type of thinking about contagion comes from the Civil Rights Movement, where the most interesting thing is it spread nationwide, but the ties that carried it nationwide weren't like weak, casual social contacts.
They were like strong, reinforcing social contacts that carried it from social group to social group. And so that pattern or geometry played a huge role. And that's other examples like Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter and so forth.
And so I'm interested to talk a little bit about not the individual level of a person by themselves, right, taking like in the person association task, and not just like the large architecture of what law is at the moment, but at the meso level between the micro and the macro. And really on the aggregation dynamics of how those interactions aggregate up and situations where try as people might, they're just in the wrong sort of aggregation process or in the wrong social network, and it's just not going to work. But if you find sort of the right spot in the social network, it's a massive lever and can tip massive populations and get into social tipping point dynamics, which is something you guys talked about.
So I'm curious on your thoughts about how that interacts with the sort of eye on your situation logic.
Dan Kelly: I think the first thing to say is, I think we're in complete agreement that there is tons of really important action between the macro level and then the sort of simple individual personal level. And we have some stuff in there, like you said, about tipping points. A big part of our message there is, it's extremely difficult to predict them.
And I know you've done work on this yourself. Our kind of our take there is we know that we know social tipping points happen. We have some sense of when they've happened in the past.
And from the ground, it's difficult to know when they are likely to happen in the wild. If we're two steps away from a big tipping point, or if we're a very long way away from a big tipping point. But most of the...
It'd be interesting to hear what you thought about our chapter on tipping points there. But most of our work thinking about what's happening between the very macro and the individual is even not even talking about a distinction that we make is between formal institutions and informal institutions, or sort of like explicit policies, versus just social norms, which influence the way people make decisions and behaviors, and how those are also very sensitive to their perceptions of group membership and social identity. So we have a chapter on social identity.
We have a chapter on social norms, which is very much our attempt to say something about this Meza level, which comes out of the cognitive sciences. One of the really useful concepts that we have there, or that I found both empowering and enlightening, was this idea of spillover. So it's easy to think of the consequences of any action you might take individually, or decision that you might make, purely in terms of its material downstream effects.
Am I going to get someone else infected with COVID? Am I going to save a gallon of gas by riding my bike to work? Am I going to save a little bit of energy by putting solar panels on my house?
Those are real and important material effects that different individual decisions and behaviors make. But there's also the signaling effects, right? So if I ride my bike to work on a regular basis, then it's not just that I'm saving a little bit of money on gas.
I'm also helping to normalize this particular behavior. I'm signaling to other people in my community, the ones who can see me.
Damon Centola: Yeah, it’s a visible behavior.
Dan Kelly: Right. Also, the visibility part of this has changed radically with social media. So now I can post obnoxiously about it on my Instagram account as well.
Now, it's not just the people who see me riding to work, it's everyone who has to look at me virtue signaling online as well. But you're pumping a message out into the world, which is also an effect of the behavior that you take on the people around you. So that's part of what we had in mind when we talked about everything you do is helping create the situation within other people are making decisions in which they're making choices.
Damon Centola: Well, I mean, that's a great point. I think the interesting thing with the cognitive science, sort of the computational social science on this, is that if you're getting multiple reinforcing signals from multiple people, then the effect is increasing. But if you keep getting the same signal from the same person, the effect starts decreasing.
In the same way that you get annoyed if you see the same telemarketer calling you day after day, versus it's like six different firms call you and you think, oh, maybe there's something I'm missing out on. And so there's this interesting sort of potentially negative effect that comes from doing it in the wrong way, right?
Michael Brownstein: I think that's exactly right. And I think, I mean, to me, the details that you're talking about, about how network effects work when they do and backfire when they do, is sort of a crucial next step for us that I think could be really powerful in terms of taking this sort of setup that we've got and taking it to the next steps. And one bit I want to just add into this conversation, which I'd be curious, Damon, if you think connects, is the emphasis we put on social roles in the book.
So it's not as if we all have the same relationship to the people we're signaling to. And when someone does, you know, says they care about climate change or rides their bike and talks about it and talks about that they're doing it because they care about climate change, it depends on whether it's your boss or whether it's your employee or your dad or your sister or whoever. And so, to me, the paying important attention not just to the generic idea that we have social networks that we can influence and trying to influence multiple networks for the reasons you just said, but also paying attention to who we are in virtue of those social networks, is both a sort of avenue for power and also possible unintended consequences.
Damon Centola: Yeah, I mean, that's such an interesting point. I think this might be one of the loose tethers where there might be more room for the future intersection of cognitive science with sort of computational social science and network science. So there's some results on this, but they're not as well understood as we would like them to be.
So one of the interesting results is that for some things like, let's say, adopting health behavior going to the gym, it's trivial that people who are similar to you, similar age, similar gender, similar health conditions, are pretty influential. And the more of the signals you get, the more likely you are to go ahead and join the gym. But it's interesting when it's something that requires broad legitimacy.
And so support for marriage inequality becomes one of the really interesting cases here. Because Facebook in 2013, this was just prior to the Supreme Court hearing the case, launched a campaign to change your profile to show support for marriage equality. But if you remember Facebook in 2013, you have a lot of people who are paying attention to you, right?
It's not just your friends, it's your grandparents and your high school friends and your colleagues at work and also your neighbors. And so you're socially constrained by the expectations of these different social groups. And so the colleagues at Cornell came up with this term structural diversity.
And what they meant by that was, look, you want reinforcing signals, but if it's all friends from your high school theater group who are saying, yes, I support this and nobody else is, that's sort of a net negative because it tells you it's sort of a niche movement. But if you see like one of your grandparents and then one of your neighbors, one of your college friends, a couple of your colleagues at work, then reinforcing signals from different groups actually tells you this is a widely legitimated behavior. And so what Facebook saw, and this is from a lot of Domek's work, she's a UCF Physicist at Michigan, and now she's one of the premier data analysts at Facebook.
She showed that support for marriage equality spread to 2.7 million people in seven days, which is stunning in the scale of a social movement, and also directly impacted the awareness of the court about large-scale support for this sort of change, and support for marriage equality. And what's so interesting about that is that the definitive factor of social networks wasn't just that they were reinforcing signals, is they're reinforcing signals from different kinds of people. And so this is a kind of thing, this is sort of the type of thing that I discuss in my work, but what's not delved into, and I think this is sort of some of the points that Dan was saluting to as well, is why, what's the cognitive mechanism that makes the diversity of signals so relevant for legitimacy, but not as relevant for something where health, or credibility is an issue, where homophily plays a role.
And as a sort of a computational social scientist, or as network theorists, you just kind of stop there. That's the water's edge. You say, well, these dynamics we can observe, we can reproduce them, they're, you know, they're causal.
We can identify the mechanisms and show how they work, but there is not a kind of intrapersonal examination of what the cognitive science, or the evolutionary psychology is behind that. So that may be a good sort of point of departure for thinking about some of those things.
Michael Brownstein: Yeah, I'll just say real quickly, I love that thought, and where I want to take it is wanting to test interventions that would encourage people to signal certain ideas, or values, or choices in the ways you're describing. In cross-pressured ways where the thing you're broadcasting to your network is not what they would expect you to broadcast. It would be fascinating to see if you can set up a controlled experiment, getting people to do that in particular domains, do you get the kind of marriage equality effects that you're observing in the Facebook case?
Damon Centola: Well, I see this project as we're integrating the book into this larger conversation as this interesting tightrope you're walking with, methodological individualism. On the one hand, you're pushing back against methodological individualism saying you can't just do the individual, there's got to be some larger interaction dynamic that helps us understand social norms and social aggregation. But I really like that you came out and said very clearly, look, psychology is not ineliminable, we can't get rid of it.
So we're sort of saving something for methodological individualism. And the question is what? How much of that do we need or how much can we just describe actors in context?
So much of the network science is saying, look, if we find on a massive interconnected network, whether it's online or in a network neighborhood, if we find the certain location that we think of as highly central, and there are lots of technical definitions for central, it doesn't matter who the person is. It only matters that they're in that location. If we seed or intervene or activate that location to be change agents, we're going to get massive large-scale change.
That's where the aggregation dynamics and tipping points take off. But I feel like you're adding to that and you're saying, well, sure, that may be true, but let's try to understand the people in that situation. You can identify them and locate them and talk causally about them as people located in that network position.
But you've then left out who the person is entirely, right? You've just said they're sort of in that social spot. So is there a way of talking about who that person is and how being in that social spot helps to sort of change your psychology or alter how you see other people?
Dan Kelly: I think just a hugely important piece of the puzzle here is going to be getting more sophisticated about the psychology of social identity because it's huge in a lot of the different kinds of examples that you give and especially in the sort of meso level between the very high macro and the individual personal because people don't belong to just one group. They don't occupy just a single social role and they don't bear just a single social identity. All of us at this point have a whole bunch of different ones that they bear and getting more sophisticated about that I think is going to be crucial for all of this theorizing about how social change happens and how people are likely to perceive signals about different attitudinal changes, not just from one group but from different groups.
They're sort of registering them as members of different social categories and bearing social identities is how I would interpret the kind of results that you were describing earlier. And I can just give an example here of something that was fairly effective which took this idea that social identity is both very important but multiple to heart. So when my home university is Purdue in Indiana and when COVID hit, Purdue was one of the first universities to bring their students back to campus.
And they also had masking mandates and requirements and social distancing requirements, which were in effect and which were being enforced to the extent that they could be enforced. But part of the ad campaign that Purdue put forward was sensitive to the fact that a lot of the student body coming back on campus is coming from Indiana, which is a very red state. And a lot of them were getting messaging, which was calling into question whether or not masking was really important or how much social distancing mattered.
And Purdue knew very well that they had, in some way or another, that they were fighting an information campaign against that. And the campaign they put forward was called the Protect Purdue campaign. And what it really did was just hammer again and again and again that the identity that matters for you when you're on campus is that we are all boiler makers.
We need to stick together. We need to protect each other as boiler makers. You may be a Hoosier at home or you may be someone who has questions about whether or not vaccinations are actually working there.
But when you are here, this is the identity which needs to move to the front. And the norms which govern us qua boiler makers are the ones that we need to stick to. And it seems like I was pleasantly surprised by how effective Purdue was on that front.
Damon Centola: I wanted to end with one because you guys spend a lot of time talking about the NRA case. And so I thought it might be enjoyable to hear you talk a little bit about why you like that case so much and how it forms sort of a template for how we think about change going forward. And of course, one of the focal questions for me is, do we want to imitate the NRA? I mean, there's a question of success and efficacy, but there's also a question of, well, at what cost? If they create a bunch of single issue voters, then is that really the world we want to live in? So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Michael Brownstein: So the NRA is a terrific case study for the power of creating group identity for social change. So most people are familiar with the idea that the NRA is or has been incredibly powerful in American politics. But I think a lot of people have the assumption, which is the assumption I had, which is that their power comes from having a lot of money and being really well resourced.
And the reality is actually that their influence predated their resources. And so what they did in short was create a social identity around gun ownership. And there's this really terrific history about the guy whose brainchild this was, who it is impossible not to mention murdered two teenagers when he was young to Mexican immigrant or so he thought Latino teenagers who were loitering, quote unquote, and he was convicted of murder and then it was overturned.
So he's not somebody that I find the least bit admirable. But he really spent his life crafting this strategy where they would seed concepts like being an anti-gunner into local newspapers and they would feed ideas to journalists and they would put it out in their network. They would also just give lots of benefits to people who would be willing to join the NRA.
And the ultimate result was that gun ownership became like a classic single issue topic for people who cared about it where they might be willing to vote for a candidate who they disagree with on a lot of issues but not guns. And they saw themselves as part of a community. Interestingly, the NRA really kind of inherited this idea from the Temperance Movement before them who did a similar thing, which was, again, create a community around this issue and then trade reliable votes with elites, with elected representatives.
And then after the NRA, the Youth Climate Movement really tried to adopt the same strategy. So it's not as if, like, the NRA is a special case that where something to do with guns was enabling them to pull this strategy off. I think there's a broader lesson for organizing and movement building, which is, again, this sort of idea of social identity being a really powerful motivator for people both in terms of getting involved, but also in electoral strategizing.
So that's kind of the set up. The complicated answer to, like, should we emulate the NRA? I mean, certainly not in some of the topical stuff or what they were willing to do as, like, an unsavory political organization.
But I do think that the power of social identity as a political motivator is not to be underestimated. And that's the way we sort of used a lesson in the book, and try to sort of trace it out into, like, how the youth climate movement tried to use it, and how other movements could potentially try to use it.
Dan Kelly: I liked that Michael pointed to the fact that it was, the NRA was taking a page from the playbook of the temperance movement, which we kind of call back to in our short epilogue at the end of the book. Just to point out that, in a lot of respects, the temperance movement achieved a level of success that most social movements could dare to dream of. They amended the Constitution of the United States.
And then 13 years later, it got repealed. So there's another kind of lesson of epistemic humility in that. We also have a chapter in the book where we're talking about what the term is, the fog of enactment, which just because you win a particular policy war, it looks like a social movement has reached the pinnacle.
There's still a lot of work to do, sort of locking it down and making sure that the changes aren't immediately rolled back. So if you're on the winning side of a social movement, then don't think that it's over. But if you're, if things are looking particularly dark to you at any given moment, you know, the things that have been happening aren't necessarily there to stay for the long haul either.
Damon Centola: Right. So a little bit of optimism can be taken from the impermanence of things as we go forward. That's a great lesson to close on.
So thank you very much, Michael and Dan, for talking with me for a little bit. Somebody Should Do Something, How Anyone Can Create Social Change.
Michael Brownstein: Thank you, Damon. It was really a fun conversation and really appreciate you doing this.
Dan Kelly: Yeah, this was great. Thanks for taking the time.
Narrator: That was Michael Brownstein and Dan Kelly in conversation with Damon Centola discussing their book Somebody Should Do Something, How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the center's people, projects, and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered Team, thanks for listening.