Beyond Social Networks: How Cultural Beliefs Really Spread

When Amir Goldberg had his first child a decade ago, he was bewildered to learn that some of his colleagues at Princeton University, where he was a doctoral student, weren’t planning to vaccinate their offspring.

It seemed obvious to Goldberg that vaccines were crucial to protecting his daughter’s health. Yet people who were similar to him — left-leaning, highly educated academics — had come to the opposite conclusion. They distrusted Big Pharma and thought that vaccines put their kids at risk of autism and other health problems. What accounted for the vast gulf between their beliefs and his?

Goldberg suspected that the explanation ran counter to a prominent theory among sociologists called social contagion. This model holds that beliefs and behaviors spread like a virus. They infect the people with whom one has the strongest ties, and the primary obstacles to their expansion are the boundaries dividing social groups.

But social contagion didn’t adequately explain the anti-vaxxers. “We were passionately divergent about how we interpreted the same reality,” Goldberg says, “yet the idea that we were in different networks was just incorrect.”

THE ROLE OF MEANING

Goldberg, now an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, came up with a new theory, which he calls associative diffusion, to explain cultural variation in contemporary societies. Influenced by insights from cognitive science, he and Sarah K. Stein, a PhD student he advised, describe the model in a recent paper in the American Sociological Review.