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A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization

Naturevolume 489, pages295–298 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies9,10,11,12,13, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way14–19. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users’ friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between ‘close friends’ who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.

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Figure 1:The experiment and direct effects.
Figure 2:The effect of mobilization treatment that a friend received on a user’s behaviour.

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ArticleOpen access05 May 2025

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to S. Aral, J. Berger, M. Cebrian, D. Centola, N. Christakis, C. Dawes, L. Gee, D. Green, C. Kam, P. Loewen, P. Mucha, J. P. Onnela, M. Porter, O. Smirnov and C. Volden for comments on early drafts. This work was supported in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the University of Notre Dame and the John Templeton Foundation as part of the Science of Generosity Initiative.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Political Science Department, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA,

    Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler

  2. Psychology Department, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA,

    Jason J. Jones

  3. Data Science, Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, California 94025, USA ,

    Adam D. I. Kramer & Cameron Marlow

  4. Medical Genetics Division, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA,

    James H. Fowler

Authors
  1. Robert M. Bond
  2. Christopher J. Fariss
  3. Jason J. Jones
  4. Adam D. I. Kramer
  5. Cameron Marlow
  6. Jaime E. Settle
  7. James H. Fowler

Contributions

AuthorContributions All authors contributed to study design, data collection, analysis and preparation of the manuscript. J.H.F. secured funding.

Corresponding author

Correspondence toJames H. Fowler.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Text and Data, Supplementary Tables 1-19, Supplementary Figures 1-6 and additional references. (PDF 4524 kb)

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Bond, R., Fariss, C., Jones, J.et al. A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization.Nature489, 295–298 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11421

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  1. Heather Jameson

    Greetings. It's stated in the article "Showing familiar faces to users can dramatically improve the effectiveness of a mobilization message." While this is implicitly supported in the results of the study through the lack of effect on the not 'close friends' group, would a better control have been to include an 'unknown social message' with unfamiliar faces to acknowledge the effect of humans being social creatures within a wider community? Also,inclusion of pictures made the social message more visibly striking than the information message alone.On a sidenote; worth noting that these large-scale studies on free public information supported by public money are available on a pay to access platform?

  2. riversideCA

    Is anybody worried, at all, that a corperation tried to influence 61 mil facebook users political thinking. I wont be surprised if its 61 mil. Conservatives

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Editorial Summary

An off-line side to online social networking

Online social networks are everywhere. They must be influencing the way society is developing, but hard evidence is scarce. For instance, the relative effectiveness of online friendships and face-to-face friendships as drivers of social change is not known. In what may be the largest experiment ever conducted with human subjects, James Fowler and colleagues randomly assigned messages to 61 million Facebook users on Election Day in the United States in 2010, and tracked their behaviour both online and offline, using publicly available records. The results show that the messages influenced the political communication, information-seeking and voting behaviour of millions of people. Social messages had more impact than informational messages and 'weak ties' were much less likely than 'strong ties' to spread behaviour via the social network. Thus online mobilization works primarily through strong-tie networks that may exist offline but have an online representation.

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