Welcome!

I am Ben Gibson, a sociologist and professor with RAND. Feel free to visit my CV or Google Scholar page.

My research focuses on building theory-driven, foundational models for a wide variety of social systems, such as conversation and messaging, spatial interaction, sexual contacts, international relations, physician services, teams and competition, and promotion boards. For much of this work, I employed statistical methods for modeling dynamic social networks, including relational event and exponential random graph models.

My research aims are to identify and understand endogenous aspects of social systems: concepts such as imitation, repetition, reciprocity, cumulative advantage, triadic closure, and others. My approach has been to produce these endogenous models of social systems both as explanatory models of social structure and as a baseline launching point for exploration of higher-order social effects that impact the internal dynamics of these systems.

Along the way, I have pushed forward on methods, such as techniques for temporal adjustments in separable temporal exponential random graphs (STERGM), spatial methods, informant accuracy, robustness assessments, and imputation techniques.

In the future, I hope to explore how endogeneity is affected by social forces and where it breaks down, and to develop potential policy remedies for social entropy due to changes driven by climate change or natural disasters.