A recent study by David Melamed and his colleagues examined whether the emergent structures that promote cooperation are driven by reputation or can emerge purely via dynamics. To answer the research question, they recruited 1,979 Amazon Mechanical Turkers and asked them to play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game. Further, these participants were randomly assigned one of 16 experimental conditions. Results of the experiments show that dynamic networks yield high rates of cooperation even without reputational knowledge. Additionally, the study found that the targeted choice condition in static networks yields cooperation rates as high as those in dynamic networks.

The original article is available here.

By Carolyn Parkinson, Adam M. Kleinbaum, & Thalia Wheatley

Human social networks are overwhelmingly homophilous: individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them in terms of a range of physical attributes (e.g., age, gender). Do similarities among friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To test whether friendship, and more generally, social network proximity, is associated with increased similarity of real-time mental responding, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan subjects’ brains during free viewing of naturalistic movies. Here we show evidence for neural homophily: neural responses when viewing audiovisual movies are exceptionally similar among friends, and that similarity decreases with increasing distance in a real-world social network. These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us, which has implications for interpersonal influence and attraction.

Read the article here.

by Johanne Saint-Charles and Pierre Mongeau

Adopting a socio-semantic perspective, this study aims to verify the relation between social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups and explore its modification over time. Data consist of video transcripts of 45, 3-h group meetings and weekly sociometric questionnaires. Relation between tie strength, actor centrality within the influence network, and shared elements of discourse between group members are examined over time. Observed correlations support the hypothesis of a relation between social influence and discourse similarity. Changes over time suggest a similarity threshold above which the relation between similarity and influence is reversed.

Read the full article here.

Anthropologists have long argued that fear of victimization through witchcraft accusations promotes cooperation in small-scale societies. Others have argued that witchcraft beliefs undermine trust and therefore reduce social cohesion. However, there are very few, if any, quantified empirical examples demonstrating how witchcraft labels can structure cooperation in real human communities. Here we show a case from a farming community in China where people labelled zhu were thought capable of supernatural activity, particularly poisoning food. The label was usually applied to adult women heads of household and often inherited down the female line. We found that those in zhuhouseholds were less likely to give or receive gifts or farm help to or from non-zhu households; nor did they have sexual partnerships or children with those in non-zhu households. However, those in zhuhouseholds did preferentially help and reproduce with each other. Although the tag is common knowledge to other villagers and used in cooperative and reproductive partner choice, we found no evidence that this assortment was based on cooperativeness or quality. We favour the explanation that stigmatization originally arose as a mechanism to harm female competitors. Once established, fear that the trait is transmissible may help explain the persistence of this deep-rooted cultural belief.

Source: Nature

Recently Aaron Clauset and his colleague share their new study: “Scale-free networks are rare”. In this study, they found scale-free network structure is not so prevalent based on their statistical analyses of almost 1000 network datasets across different domains. In particular, their results indicate only 4% of the datasets showing the strongest-possible evidence of scale-free structure and 52% demonstrating the weakest-possible evidence.

Additionally, this study has invoked intense conversations over Twitter. For instance, Laszlo Barabasi retweeted Aaron Caluset’s tweet, saying “Every 5 years someone is shocked to re-discover that a pure power law does not fit many networks. True: Real networks have predictable deviations. Hence forcing a pure power law on these is like…fitting a sphere to the cow. Sooner or later the hoof will stick out.”

Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03400

Link to Barabasi’s retweet: https://twitter.com/barabasi/status/952920675592953856

Recently, Omodei, Brashears, and Arenas published a paper about describing a mechanistic model of human network recall and demonstrate its sufficiency for capturing human recall behavior based on experimental data. They found that human recall is based on accurate recall of a hub of high degree actors and also uses compression heuristics (i.e., schemata simplifying the encoding and recall of social information) for both structural and affective information.

The original paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17385-z

A recent study investigated a new way to identify the strength of ties. Using two different large datasets, the researchers found that for each pair of individuals, a bow tie structure of the network itself is strongly associated with the strength of ties between them that the researchers measure in other ways.

The abstract of the paper is as follows: Understanding tie strength in social networks, and the factors that influence it, have received much attention in a myriad of disciplines for decades. Several models incorporating indicators of tie strength have been proposed and used to quantify relationships in social networks, and a standard set of structural network metrics have been applied to predominantly online social media sites to predict tie strength. Here, we introduce the concept of the “social bow tie” framework, a small subgraph of the network that consists of a collection of nodes and ties that surround a tie of interest, forming a topological structure that resembles a bow tie. We also define several intuitive and interpretable metrics that quantify properties of the bow tie. We use random forests and regression models to predict categorical and continuous measures of tie strength from different properties of the bow tie, including nodal attributes. We also investigate what aspects of the bow tie are most predictive of tie strength in two distinct social networks: a collection of 75 rural villages in India and a nationwide call network of European mobile phone users. Our results indicate several of the bow tie metrics are highly predictive of tie strength, and we find the more the social circles of two individuals overlap, the stronger their tie, consistent with previous findings. However, we also find that the more tightly-knit their non-overlapping social circles, the weaker the tie. This new finding complements our current understanding of what drives the strength of ties in social networks.

A link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04177

A link to a news article for the paper: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609146/how-close-are-you-really/

by Josué Ortega and Philipp Hergovich

We used to marry people to which we were somehow connected to: friends of friends, schoolmates, neighbors. Since we were more connected to people similar to us, we were likely to marry someone from our own race.

However, online dating has changed this pattern: people who meet online tend to be complete strangers. Given that one-third of modern marriages start online, the authors investigate theoretically, using random graphs and matching theory, the effects of those previously absent ties in the diversity of modern societies.

The authors find that when a society benefits from previously absent ties, social integration occurs rapidly, even if the number of partners met online is small. Their findings are consistent with the sharp increase in interracial marriages in the U.S. in the last two decades.

Read the full article here.