Welcome!

I am Ben Gibson, a sociologist, professor, and project lead with RAND. Feel free to visit my CV or google scholar page.

My research focuses on building a foundational intuition 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 models for modeling dynamic social networks, including relational event models and exponential random graph models.

My research aims are to identify and model endogeneous aspects of social systems: how social actions are influenced by other social actions. Many systems can be predicted reliably and in an interpretable way using concepts such as reciprocity, cumulative advantage, habitual action, and other endogeneous trends. My approach is to produce these endogeneous models of social systems both as explanatory models of social structure and a baseline launching point for further investigation.

Along the way, I have pushed on methodological development, such as STERGM adjustments, spatial methods, informant accuracy, robustness assessments, and imputation techniques.

In the future, I hope to explore the contexts in which endogeneity breaks down, and develop potential remedies for social entropy due to climate change or other major catastrophes.