We all spend much of our days engaged in social networks, whether it’s online, at work, or out with our friends, and we have a tendency to pick up new habits through these connections. A new study in Science set out to determine how behaviors travel through these social networks, and how the topography of the networks affects the diffusion of the behaviors.

The experiment studied two different structures of social networks. In “random” networks, individuals are connected to others scattered throughout the network by connections that are called “long ties.” In more “clustered” networks, social ties exist mostly between individuals that are close together in the network; there are few (if any) long ties connecting individuals from different topographical areas.

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Why a school beats Facebook: how behaviors spread through networks