Networks in the News

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?… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

by Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman

Over the last 13 years, Facebook has evolved from a lifestyle site for college kids into a cornerstone of civic life. It is one of a handful of very large platforms that dominate our online world.… Read the rest