Mitchell centre Seminar series
| Dates: | 19 October 2022 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Petr Matous
The University of Sydney
Male and stale? Questioning the role of opinion leaders in network interventions
Social networks can influence people’s behaviour and therefore it is assumed that central actors in social networks, also called “opinion leaders”, play a key role in driving change in socio-ecological interventions. This assumption is often explicitly or implicitly relied on when targeting sustainability programs in agriculture. In the first part of the talk, I will briefly review eight recent studies from diverse countries, which I have been involved in and that explore this topic. The results of these studies collectively suggest that interventions which aim to utilize social networks to drive desired change also often unintentionally alter these networks which may bring about further unwanted consequences. Building on this overview, in the second part, I will talk about a recent experiment in targeting an intervention at (a) central opinion leaders identified by interviews and a social network survey of 1885 cocoa farmers Indonesia and (b) random low-centrality farmers for comparison. Contrary to expectations, the highly socially central actors were not more effective in promoting the initiative in their communities. On average, randomly selected low-centrality farmers convinced almost twice as many of their peers to take recommended actions as compared to the identified opinion leaders but the variation within the random group was also significantly higher. Importantly, although the identified opinion leaders were mostly senior men, women performed better in influencing others into taking action even when their centrality in the reported social networks of agricultural advice was lower. I discuss the implications for seeding network interventions aiming at achieving sustainable and equitable change at scale.
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G7
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
