Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence – A CHIBE Book Talk with Damon Centola, PhD

Speaker(s)

• 
  Damon Centola, PhD — Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

Event Description

Registration is required to attend. Please register here: https://upenn.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ss9K3CbwQTSU1GqL_P0rMQ.

Join us for a thought-provoking discussion with Professor Damon Centola about his new book release “Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence.”

For decades, we’ve been taught that social influence inevitably leads to groupthink, resulting in conformity, polarization, and poor decision-making. Drawing on dozens of groundbreaking studies, Prof. Damon Centola challenges this widely held belief and reveals a surprising new science of crowd wisdom, showing that when people are connected through the right network structures, social influence becomes a powerful source of collective intelligence. From online communities that successfully resist disinformation campaigns to research teams that accelerate innovation and polarized groups that find themselves drawn toward common ground. Just as poorly structured networks produce groupthink, properly structured networks can produce “goodthink,” a form of collective intelligence that enables groups to make better decisions, solve complex problems, and achieve outcomes that exceed the capabilities of even their smartest members. This talk presents these discoveries and the practical principles they offer for designing smarter teams, organizations, online platforms, communities and institutions, offering a roadmap for better outcomes for our increasingly complex and large-scale challenges.

Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Damon’s research centers on social networks, collective intelligence, and behavior change. His work has received numerous scientific awards, including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and CNN, among other outlets. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Per Bak Capital Partners, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation. Damon’s speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Apple, Cigna, General Motors, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry’s, the U.S. Army, and the NBA, among others. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (PUP 2018) and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little, Brown Spark 2021). His forthcoming book is Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence (MIT Press / Penguin Random House, October 2026).