HASS Talk: Network Visibility Interventions for Behavioural Change by Dr. Akihiro Nishi

Abstract

Some behaviours and attributes of humans are visible to others over social networks, while other behaviours and attributes are not. Such a level of visibility of behaviour and attributes may alter the degree of social learning and social comparison and affect the level of health and well-being. In the seminar, Akihiro discusses two main papers (Nishi et al., 2015, Nature, “Inequality and visibility of wealth in experimental social networks”; Nishi et al., 2023, Nature Mental Health, “Status invisibility alleviates the economic gradient in happiness in social network experiments”, and other ongoing work regarding visibility of others’ behaviour and attributes.

About the Speaker

Akihiro is a physician-scientist and tenured associate professor of epidemiology at UCLA with expertise in computational social science, social network analysis, and social epidemiology. He holds a medical degree from the University of Tokyo (2007) and a Doctor of Public Health in social and behavioural sciences from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2013). He has made two significant discoveries: “Making the wealth of others invisible can increase cooperation and well-being and reduce economic inequality in experiments” (Nishi et al., 2015, Nature; Nishi and Christakis, 2015, PNAS, Nishi et al., 2023, Nature Mental Health), and “Random partitioning of social networks can mitigate a pandemic without sacrificing people’s economic activity in network-based simulations” (Nishi et al, 2020, PNAS). With support from NIH, NSF, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), he is currently focusing on network intervention planning in social networks with outbreaks, and more broadly, the effect of visibility of behaviours and attributes. He was selected for Hellman Fellow (2019) and UCLA Innovation Fellow (2022).