Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation
By Amir Goldberg, S. K. Stein. American Sociological Review, 2018
132 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. We propose an alternative explanation we call associative diffusion. Drawing on two insights from research in cognition—that meaning inheres in cognitive associations between concepts, and that perceived associations constrain people’s actions—we introduce a model in which, rather than beliefs or behaviors, the things being transmitted between individuals are perceptions about what beliefs or behaviors are compatible with one another. Conventional contagion models require the assumption that networks are segregated to explain cultural variation. We show, in contrast, that the endogenous emergence of cultural differentiation can be entirely attributable to social cognition and does not require a segregated network or a preexisting division into groups. Moreover, we show that prevailing assumptions about the effects of network topology do not hold when diffusion is associative.
Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ab2c006af8ff017c91bdb2cae915418eb547695
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Citations in the corpus
- Duality in Diversity: How Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Cultural Heterogeneity Relate to Firm Performance (2019, background): “Under some circumstances such exposure begets intrapersonal cultural breadth (Morris, Chiu, and Liu, 2015), but under others it serves to narrow cultural repertoires and entrench cultural divisions (Bail et al., 2018; Goldberg and Stein, 2018).”
- Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data (2020, unknown): “…sociologists posit that adults adopt the beliefs and behaviors of their friends (Centola 2018; Christakis and Fowler 2009; DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy 2015), or that individuals adopt behaviors they view as consistent with their cultural dispositions (Goldberg and Stein 2018), they invoke this model.”