SONIC members, Jacqueline Ng and Noshir Contractor, are coauthors along with Leslie DeChurch (ATLAS, Northwestern) and Paul Leonardi (UCSB) of “The Sociomateriality of Teamwork” presented at the Organizational Science Winter Conference on the theme “Technology and the Modern Organization” on March 2nd, 2018 in Park City, Utah.
SONIC hosts a Relational Event Modeling research incubator
SONIC hosted a Relational Event Modeling research incubator on Feb 23rd and Feb 24th where 10 researchers from the US Army Research Lab, Stanford, University of Georgia, Purdue and Northwestern discussed how recent advances in relational event modeling can be leveraged to address their research questions and how novel research questions can in turn prompt methodological advances in relational event modeling.
Similar neural responses predict friendship
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.
Noshir Contractor delivered a keynote address at the Computational Communication Science conference
Noshir Contractor delivered a keynote titled “Combining Big Data and Conventional Methods” at the Computational Communication Science conference, on February 16th in Hanover, Germany.
SONIC welcomes Cristina Casareale
SONIC welcomes Cristina Casareale, a visiting Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Protection at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (Ancona, Italy). During her 6 month visit, Cristina will work with SONIC to study the networks among the key players involved in response to the 2012 Costa Concordia maritime disaster.
Social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups
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.
SONIC will present at the ICA in May 2018
Two SONIC papers will be presented at the 68th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Prague, the Czech Republic on the 24-28 of May 2018.
Tanaka, K., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2018, May). Origins of omission and commission errors in perceptions of group communication networks.
Schultz, M., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2018, May). Communicating through space and over time.
Also, Noshir will participate on a panel titled “Professor as entrepreneur: opportunities and risk.” The title of his presentation is Why inhaling digital exhaust is taking organizational performance and the science of communication and technology to new highs.
SONIC-collaborated paper to be presented at the 3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium
A paper, co-authored by Noshir Contractor will be presented at the 3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium, to be held on May 10-12th in Chania, Greece. The Symposium theme is “What leaders actually do.”
Mesmer-Magnus, J., Niler, A., DeChurch, L.A., & Contractor, N.S. (2018, May). Working and leading the way to Mars: How work affects shared leadership. Paper to be presented at the 3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium, Chania, Greece.
Diego Gómez-Zará presents at Kellogg Enlace
On January 30th, 2018, the Ph.D. Student Diego Gómez-Zará presented at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. This talk was organized by the program ENLACE
Diego’s talk was titled “The Role of Social Movements in Twitter: Evidence from the Chilean Student Movement.” He presented the current role of organizations in social media. In the digital era, organizations have become active actors, where they must motivate, interact, and engage with their audiences permanently.
Noshir Contractor attends an SBS Decadal Workshop on Workforce Development
On January 24th, 2018, Noshir chaired a workshop on Workforce Development and Intelligence Analysis, designed to gather information for the Decadal Survey of Social and Behavioral Sciences for Applications to National Security.
