But it also comes with the costs of creating echo chambers and increasing Homophily.
Researchers call this tendency Homophily, which stems from the Greek words for love of sameness.
Q- Can you explain Homophily further
and what can be done to counteract the deleterious effects that you describe?
Of course, the idea that nodes connected in a social network are also more
likely to share other characteristics is what Homophily is about.
Then, the key to counteracting Homophily is identifying which critical information and opportunities it blocks access to-
and crafting policies that provide the lacking information and opportunities.
In contrast,
in smaller high schools there tends to be less Homophily- simply because students are pushed
together more across racial lines and also have fewer options within their own race.
Through interdisciplinary research, we have found that moral Homophily- or a preference for people who share our moral values-
also determines whom we prefer to spend our time with and which political party we endorse.
We find in our research that a specific class of moral values related to concerns about purity- our spiritual beliefs, definitions of the soul, what we perceive to be“dirty” or“clean” and which baser instincts we feel we must transcend-
plays a central role in Homophily.