Goodthink

Busting the myth of “groupthink,” an insightful look at how our ability to influence one another can accelerate individual and collective intelligence.

A leading expert on social networks and behavior change delivers new principles of social influence to improve collective intelligence.

For years, scientists have struggled to discover the formula to produce the world’s smartest teams. But the solution has been elusive because they have focused on individual intelligences. In Goodthink, Damon Centola shows how to build teams, design online platforms, and create office spaces that sharpen our thinking individually and align our intelligence collectively. The secret, it turns out, is in the shape of our networks.

How did MIT’s Building 20, populated with outcasts and eccentrics, become one of the most innovative and productive research hubs in American history? Why did increasing the number of online echo chambers unexpectedly reduce political polarization? How can popular “herding behavior” make crowds more intelligent? This book has the answers. Taking us behind the scenes of the most successful systems of collective intelligence in the modern world, it introduces a new science of what it means to be smart.

Every day, each of us faces four critical decision-making challenges: choosing, coordination, cooperation, and creativity. Goodthink describes the tell-tale signs of when effective structures are at work, enabling us to “read the room” and begin to shift the dynamics at play. It also reveals how to know when things are failing and what to do to fix them.

Delivering path-breaking insights currently at work within Fortune 500 companies, global philanthropic organizations, and government agencies, the book reveals underlying dynamics of group intelligence that have gone overlooked. Showing us how these principles work to make us feel more confident, more connected, and more engaged, Goodthink leaves us feeling smarter—because we are!Damon Centola is Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the founding director of the Network Dynamics Group and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a network method to spread new ideas and beliefs online. He is the recipient of numerous scientific awards, including the 2017 James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society and the 2011 Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology. He is the author of Change and How Behavior Spreads.