Social contagion of fertility: an agent-based simulation study

Abstract

Social contagion is a process in which the behavior of a social group spreads across a population. We model and analyze this phenomenon with respect to fertility in an agent-based social simulation study. Our model integrates personal motivations for having children and social influences to allow for quantifying their respective impact on fertile behavior. We use a real-world dataset for model calibration and compare three hypothetical scenarios with the reference setting. Our results show that each of the social influences has a statistically significant impact on birth rates in the agent population. Moreover, we identify differences in the effects of social pressure and social support depending on a person’s age. This shows that our simulation is not only capable of realistically reflecting family development, but can also provide further insights into the functioning of social mechanisms in a controlled experiment setting.