The debate about how ideas, opinions, and behaviors radiate within groups of people goes back decades. According to the so-calle

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问题     The debate about how ideas, opinions, and behaviors radiate within groups of people goes back decades. According to the so-called influentials hypothesis, made popular by books such as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a small number of highly influential people drive most of the spread. But critics counter that influential individuals play only a minor role, and what matters is whether people are susceptible to the new idea.
    The debate has remained unsettled because studying peer influence is notoriously difficult. Studies of the real world are messy and rarely allow for controlled experiments, whereas social experiments in laboratories are expensive and involve contrived situations. So, researchers are turning to online social networks such as Facebook.
    To test peer influence, Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker, economists at New York University, used a Facebook app that allows users to rate and recommend movies. As users interact with the app—for example, you give the 2011 movie The Tree of Life four out of five stars— it sends messages to a random selection of your Facebook friends notifying them of the rating and providing a link to the app. The more friends that adopt the app after receiving a notification from you, the greater your influence. The shorter the time period between receiving a notification and adopting the app yourself, the higher your susceptibility. Aral and Walker built a model of the app’s "contagion" through this massive social network If the influentials hypothesis is true, most of the spread should be catalyzed by a small number of key people.
    Reality seems to fall somewhere between influence and susceptibility. Both are important, but contagion depended on the personal traits of the people. For example, people older than 30 were more influential than those who are younger than 30, and people of the same age had the most influence on each other. Women tended to influence men more than they influenced each other. But most surprisingly, influence and susceptibility almost never occurred in the same person. At least in the Facebook network, there are only trendsetters and followers. Brian Uzzi, a social scientist at Northwestern University says , the division between influence and susceptibility could have a large influence on online marketing, allowing companies to predict not only whether you will be interested in a particular product, but also whether you’re the kind of person who can drive it to go viral. However, says Uzzi, "to know if virtual world social influence substitutes, complements, or is independent of the real world, we need another experiment that looks at the diffusion of the same product on Facebook and in the real world. "
The researchers account one as an "influential" if______.

选项 A、he has a huge number of facebook friends
B、a large percentage of his friends rate the movie
C、most of his friends’ ratings are similar to his
D、his friends adopt the app soon after receiving the notification

答案B

解析 [A]选项的误区在于人们通常持有的观念“谁的Facebook朋友越多,说明谁在网络中的影响力越大”。但这与研究者的规定无关,故排除。[C]选项的误区在于考生对“你给电影评四星并将评分情况发给你的好友”的过度推导。文中并未提及“朋友评分情况”和“你的影响力”之间的关系。[D]选项的误区在于第三段第四句确实提及了“朋友收到通知和使用程序之间的间隔长短”。但该信息是用于说明研究者对“被影响性”的定义,和“影响力”定义无关。
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