Model for simulating mechanisms responsible of similarities between people connected in networks of social relations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple simulation model to analyze the mechanisms behind similarities among socially connected individuals, distinguishing homophily, confounding, and social contagion effects.

Contribution

It proposes a novel model and a measure to identify the dominant social mechanism influencing attitude similarity in social networks.

Findings

The model effectively simulates social similarity mechanisms.

The measure distinguishes the primary mechanism in different scenarios.

Applicable to analyzing social influence and homophily effects.

Abstract

It the literature have been identified three social mechanisms explaining the similarity between people connected in the network of social relations homophily, confounding and social contagion. The article proposes a simple model for simulating mechanisms responsible for similarity of attitudes in networks of social relations; along with a measure that is able to indicate which of the three mechanisms has taken major role in the process.