An educational program intended to improve maternal and child health fundamentally altered the social fabric of the rural Honduran villages where it was implemented, a new Yale-led study finds. The findings, researchers say, have implications for interventions anywhere that seek to improve people’s well-being by disseminating information or changing behaviors through social contagion.

A prior study involving the same program in Honduras showed that exploiting social networks can enhance the effectiveness of public health and other interventions. This new study suggests that such initiatives also rewire existing social connections within the communities that receive them.

The study, based on a randomized controlled trial involving 8,331 people in 110 remote Honduran villages, found that the educational intervention not only changed whom people engaged with for health-related advice but also affected their friend and financial networks.