11. Explaining changes in physical activity with a computational model of social contagion

Social processes play a key role in health behavior. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of such processes is important when designing health interventions with a social component. In this work, we apply a computational model of social contagion to a data set of 2,472 users of a physical activity promotion program. We compare this model’s predictions to the predictions of a simple linear model that has been derived by a regression analysis. The results show that the social contagion model performs better at describing the pattern seen in the empirical data than the linear model, indicating that some of the dynamics of the physical activity levels in the network can be explained by social contagion processes.