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Key Words human ecology, voluntary associations, organizations
* Abstract Similarity breeds connection. This principle-the homophily principle-structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localized positions) within social space. We argue for more research on: (a) the basic ecological processes that link organizations, associations, cultural communities, social movements, and many other social forms; (b) the impact of multiplex ties on the patterns of homophily; and (c) the dynamics of network change over time through which networks and other social entities co-evolve.
INTRODUCTION
People with different characteristics-genders, races, ethnicities, ages, class backgrounds, educational attainment, etc.-appear to have very different qualities. We often attribute these qualities to some essential aspect of their category membership. For example, women are emotional, educated people are tolerant, and gang members are violent. These essentialist attributions ignore the vast differences in the social worlds that these people occupy. Since people generally only have significant contact with others like themselves, any quality tends to become localized in sociodemographic space. By interacting only with others who are like ourselves, anything that we experience as a result of our position gets reinforced. It comes to typify "people like us."
Homophily is the principle that a contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people. The pervasive fact of homophily means that cultural, behavioral, genetic, or material information that flows through networks will tend to be localized. Homophily implies that distance in terms of social characteristics translates into network distance, the number of relationships through which a piece of information must travel...