Homophily and behavior diffusion

Abstract

There is continuing debate over the effect of homophily, which is the tendency for individuals to socialize with similar people, on behavior diffusion. We aimed to clarify this relationship from a social network perspective, using the agent-based modeling approach. The results demonstrate that homophily promoted the diffusion of behaviors that people had a strong propensity to adopt, but had a prohibitive effect when the adoption propensity was weak. When the adoption propensity was moderate, the effect was promotive at first and then became prohibitive. Moreover, we identified 3 types of homophily—status, value, and mixed (status–value)—and found that mixed homophily was most effective for behavior diffusion, followed by value homophily and then status homophily. These findings highlight the importance of behavior classes and homophily type in the relationship between homophily and behavior diffusion, and call for a serious consideration of both factors when empirically studying the related issues.