What makes one a good group member? Is it intelligence? A recent study found that, “having a lot of intelligent people in the group did not necessarily mean that your group will have sure success.” 

According to this study, what mattered more for group success was how individuals scored on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) test. “The better the group members are in reading other people’s emotions through their eyes, the better the chances for the group’s success.”

Given some thought, the results of this study are not surprising. It certainly makes sense that a group member with the ability to be empathetic towards a fellow group member would be a better team-player than one who does not have that ability. Perhaps you might want to practice with this online RME Test before embarking on future collaborations?

Read more here: http://www.rappler.com/science-nature/ideas/science-solitaire/80143-science-group-success

This special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE focuses on how digital technology is changing the structure and dynamics of social networks and the tools we have for studying and designing them. Three main take-home messages:

• Social media, search, and data extraction technologies are not only changing the structure and dynamics of social networks, but are also changing how controllable these systems are.

• Precision, quantitatively justified interventions into behavioral dynamics are increasingly feasible within the digital domain, permitting large-scale experiments on human behavior and social systems. This is useful and presents challenges.

• We understand the relationship between energy and information – how bits get converted to watts – for electrical circuits, but not for social networks. In biology, computational social science, and the science of social engineering, the development of a functional theory of information is a central theoretical challenge that needs to be addressed if these disciplines are to have strong foundations.

Read more here: http://mae.engr.ucdavis.edu/dsouza/Pubs/PIEEE_vol102_12.pdf

Twitter announced last week that it will now make all tweets since the launch of the site in 2006 publically searchable to all users. Although the new search function is still in the works, this massive archive of tweets could mean more accessible datasets for social network researchers. From this day forward, Twitter’s search engine will index roughly half a trillion tweets.

Read more at the Twitter blog.

McFarland used two different datasets (one looking at classroom level and one looking at school level friendships) to analyze the network ecology of tie formation. His team found that larger school size and greater freedom to choose activities resulted in more homophily, while small school size and a more prescriptive curriculum resulted in greater integration.

However, they point out that student bodies rarely fall into just one camp – instead, both types of systems may exist within the same institution.  Rabinovitz-Stanford explains: “A bigger and more diverse student population may well foster self-segregation, but a smaller and more elite school is almost inherently more segregated in the first place.” In the words of McFarland: “The truth is that we are not sure which kind of adolescent society is best for youth social development…There likely isn’t a simple answer.”

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