Centola, Damon. 2011. “An Experimental Study of Homophily in the Adoption of Health Behavior.” Science 334 (6060): 1269–72. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1207055.

Notes

• Homophily improves the adoption of healthy behaviors. However what about the healthy 'seed' individuals who differentiate themselves in unhealthy populations? What explains for the radicals who are not homophilous in their behaviors? How does homophily account for people who stray away from the behaviors of the individuals in their immediate ties?

In-text annotations

"Homophily—similarity of social contacts—can increase dyadic-level influence, but it can also force less healthy individuals to interact primarily with one another, thereby excluding them from interactions with healthier, more influential, early adopters. As a result, an important network-level effect of homophily is that the people who are most in need of a health innovation may be among the least likely to adopt it." (Page 1269)

"At the dyadic level, research on diffusion has suggested that homophilous ties can promote the spread of behavior between individuals" (Page 1269)

"Homophily among high-status individuals may help to promote diffusion, but low-status individuals may be more likely to be influenced by heterophilous ties to high-status alters than by homophilous ties to similarly lowstatus individuals" (Page 1269)

"homophilously structured social networks exhibited significantly more adoption than unstructured networks" (Page 1270)

"Our findings suggest that obese individuals may be more dependent than healthier individuals on the composition of their social networks for making decisions about adopting health behaviors. This indicates that low adoption levels of health innovations among less healthy individuals (7, 8, 16, 20) may be a function of social environment rather than a baseline reluctance for adoption (25, 26)." (Page 1271)

Is the effort to be healthy is 'radical' in the sense that the healthy individuals don't mind doing things different from the general population?