Network Effects on Behavior: How Do Mechanisms Matter?
Filiz Garip
(with Paul DiMaggio)
Social scientists have long established that individuals’ behaviors are influenced by those of their network peers in many social domains. Recent work has also shown such network effects can exacerbate inequality in a behavior if networks are homophilous with respect to attributes that influence the adoption of that behavior. To extend this work, we first identify six distinct mechanisms that can underlie network effects: (i) simple contagion, (ii) social facilitation, (iiii) social observation, (iv) normative influence with or (v) without consensus, and (vi) network externalities. We then use an agent-based model to examine differences mechanisms make in (i) the level of overall adoption, and (ii) the level of intergroup inequality under different scenarios of network homophily.
Filiz Garip is Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Garip received her Ph.D. in Sociology and M.S.E in Operations Research & Financial Engineering both from Princeton University. She holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her research lies at the intersection of migration, economic sociology and inequality. Within this general area, she studies the mechanisms that enable or constrain mobility and lead to greater or lesser degrees of social and economic inequality. Her work has been published in Population and Development Review, Demography, Social Forces and the American Journal of Sociology. She is currently working on a book, which will characterize the diversity of the Mexican migrant population in the United States. Garip is currently affiliated with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Inequality and Social Policy Program at the Kennedy School. She is also the director of academic programming for the Undergraduate Research Scholars program at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard and serves as a consulting editor for the American Journal of Sociology.