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  3. The debate about how ideas, opinions, and behaviors radiate within groups of people goes back decades. According to the so-calle

The debate about how ideas, opinions, and behaviors radiate within groups of people goes back decades. According to the so-calle

admin2013-09-16  56
问题     The debate about how ideas, opinions, and behaviors radiate within groups of people goes back decades. According to the so-called influentials hypothesis, made popular by books such as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a small number of highly influential people drive most of the spread. But critics counter that influential individuals play only a minor role, and what matters is whether people are susceptible to the new idea.
    The debate has remained unsettled because studying peer influence is notoriously difficult. Studies of the real world are messy and rarely allow for controlled experiments, whereas social experiments in laboratories are expensive and involve contrived situations. So, researchers are turning to online social networks such as Facebook.
    To test peer influence, Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker, economists at New York University, used a Facebook app that allows users to rate and recommend movies. As users interact with the app—for example, you give the 2011 movie The Tree of Life four out of five stars— it sends messages to a random selection of your Facebook friends notifying them of the rating and providing a link to the app. The more friends that adopt the app after receiving a notification from you, the greater your influence. The shorter the time period between receiving a notification and adopting the app yourself, the higher your susceptibility. Aral and Walker built a model of the app’s "contagion" through this massive social network If the influentials hypothesis is true, most of the spread should be catalyzed by a small number of key people.
    Reality seems to fall somewhere between influence and susceptibility. Both are important, but contagion depended on the personal traits of the people. For example, people older than 30 were more influential than those who are younger than 30, and people of the same age had the most influence on each other. Women tended to influence men more than they influenced each other. But most surprisingly, influence and susceptibility almost never occurred in the same person. At least in the Facebook network, there are only trendsetters and followers. Brian Uzzi, a social scientist at Northwestern University says , the division between influence and susceptibility could have a large influence on online marketing, allowing companies to predict not only whether you will be interested in a particular product, but also whether you’re the kind of person who can drive it to go viral. However, says Uzzi, "to know if virtual world social influence substitutes, complements, or is independent of the real world, we need another experiment that looks at the diffusion of the same product on Facebook and in the real world. "
The conclusion of the peer influence studies is that______.
选项 A、influential individuals catalyze the diffusion of opinions
B、the prevalence of susceptible individuals catalyzes social contagions
C、influence dominates the real world while susceptibility determines the virtual world
D、the joint distribution of influence and susceptibility determines the propagation of behaviors
答案D
解析 [A]、[B]选项的误区在于，“有影响力人士足观念传播的催化剂”和“易受影响力人士的普遍存在是社会潮流形成的关键”这两种观点均在文中被提及(第一段)。但这分别是马尔科姆等的观点以及与之对立的观点，并非本文所介绍的研究发现。
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