Duncan Watts
Sociologist and network scientist, co-author of the artificial music market experiment and a long-standing critic of explanations of success constructed after the fact.
Who they are
Watts's wider argument is that cultural and commercial successes are routinely explained by properties identified once the success is known, and that such explanations are untestable because the counterfactual is missing.
The 2006 experiment supplies the missing counterfactual. Running the same songs against the same field in parallel worlds shows how much of an outcome was available to be otherwise, and the answer is most of the range between the clear best and the clear worst.
That is a limit on every account of why something caught on, including the ones this publication draws on.
Key papers
Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). "Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market." Science, 311(5762), 854-856. Third author.
Key ideas
The counterfactual problem in success stories: without a rerun, an explanation of a hit cannot be tested. See Cumulative Advantage.
Properties can make a thing more shareable without determining which shareable thing wins. That is the boundary on books of the Contagious kind, and it is a boundary rather than a refutation.
Sources
- Salganik, Dodds & Watts (2006), doi:10.1126/science.1121066, verified at the published record 5 October 2026.