Structure and contagion in social systems.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Gustave Le Bon · 1895
Argues that individuals submerged in a crowd lose their critical faculty and personal responsibility to a collective mind driven by contagion and…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities
Bryce Ryan & Neal C. Gross · 1943
Argues, from tracking how Iowa farmers adopted hybrid seed corn, that new practices spread through a community along an S-shaped curve driven by…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Who Shall Survive? A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations
Jacob L. Moreno · 1934
Argues that a group's informal structure of attraction and rejection between its members — mapped as a sociogram — determines its function far more…
+4 more at this level
9 works
Gustave Le Bon
Argues that individuals submerged in a crowd lose their critical faculty and personal responsibility to a collective mind driven by contagion and suggestion, a claim later criticised as an elitist caricature of mass politics rather than a description of it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gustave Le Bon
Argues that revolutions are driven less by rational grievance than by the same crowd psychology and mystical belief that govern religious movements, so their leaders succeed by manipulating emotion rather than argument.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bryce Ryan & Neal C. Gross
Argues, from tracking how Iowa farmers adopted hybrid seed corn, that new practices spread through a community along an S-shaped curve driven by social interaction between adopters and their neighbours, not simply by the practice's economic merit.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Howard Rheingold
Argues, from years inside the WELL bulletin board, that people form genuine, durable communities through text-only computer networks, and that these communities can strengthen rather than replace civic life.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jacob L. Moreno
Argues that a group's informal structure of attraction and rejection between its members — mapped as a sociogram — determines its function far more than its formal organisation chart does, founding sociometry as a method.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Mark S. Granovetter
Argues that acquaintances rather than close friends carry new information between social clusters, so weak ties are what connect a society and strong ones merely thicken it locally.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John D. McCarthy & Mayer N. Zald
Argues that social movements succeed or fail based on their ability to mobilise money, labour and organisation rather than on how much grievance or discontent exists in a population, since grievances are nearly always present but movements are not.
Mark Granovetter
Argues that collective outcomes like riots or fads depend less on individuals' average attitudes than on the distribution of thresholds at which each person joins in, so small differences in that distribution can flip a crowd from passive to riotous.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Albert-László Barabási & Réka Albert
Argues that most real-world networks grow by preferential attachment — new nodes link disproportionately to already well-connected ones — which alone generates the scale-free, hub-dominated structure observed across very different networks.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.