Measuring social influence for business and government
Our decisions are often far less informed and far more socially driven than we would like to think. Big data, such as sales figures, record where and when the decision to buy a product was made, but they don’t measure social influence directly. Research by Professor Alex Bentley and his colleagues in the University of Bristol’s Department of Anthropology and Archaeology has helped unlock what these datasets can say indirectly about how decisions are made and how this may change with time and across communities.