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Is Dunbar's Number Up?
Abstract
This article is a commentary on 'Relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives' (Sutcliffe, Dunbar, Binder, & Arrow, 2012).
... Thus, to date, social signature theory has limited empirical support. Furthermore, alternative theories claim that modern communication devices and services, such as online social networks (OSNs) may allow humans to break through their cognitive limits and reach the numbers of alters far greater than 150 or 250 (Wellman, 2011). ...
... Alternative theories claim that social networking sites are able to help individuals cut through the limit of the Dunbar's number (Wellman, 2011). Thus, different studies find that heavy internet users tend to have larger offline and online networks than light users and gain more ties with time (Wang & Wellman, 2010); larger online ego-networks contribute to the increase of strong ties, albeit not as much as to the growth of weak ties (Manago et al., 2012), larger online ego-networks are associated with larger core discussion networks (Vriens & van Ingen, 2018), and certain types of heavy internet use contribute to higher numbers of social ties (Zhao, 2006). ...
... Additionally, it has been shown that larger online personal networks are associated with higher perceived social capitalthat is, the perceived amount of resources that alters can share with an ego, or the perceived amount of help an ego can get from them (Ellison et al., 2014). Wellman (Rainie & Wellman, 2012;Wellman, 2011) also reviews the works (e.g. Bernard et al., 2001;McCormick et al., 2010) that estimate human networks to be much larger than 150, amounting to 1000 and more, depending on how connections are understood. ...
Social tie maintenance has always had cognitive and emotional costs and has been leading to uneven distribution of communication volume among interaction partners of individuals. This distribution, known as social signature, is assumed to be stable for each person. Availability of digital traces of human communication allows testing whether this assumption is true and whether it holds in specific channels of computer-mediated communication. In this paper, we investigate private messaging on a popular social networking website on a sample of 39 users and 8063 communication partners of those users over the period of 18 months. We find that this communication channel does not reduce cognitive costs as the overall number of users’ active contacts, on average, is equivalent to the cognitive limit known as Dunbar’s number. Confirming some previous research, we show that the volume of communication is unevenly distributed, related to emotional closeness, and that changes in this distribution (that is, the changes in social signature) over time within an individual are smaller than the distances between social signatures of different individuals. However, as an absolutely novel finding, we demonstrate that the changes within individuals are statistically significant, thus questioning the concept of social signature as a stable phenomenon.
... He found a correlation between the size of an average human brain's neocortex and social group sizes, and defined that the cognitive constraint to the number of individuals humans can maintain social relationships with is around 150. However, Wellman [3] claims that OSNs disrupted the theory behind the Dunbar's Number and that people in the OSN era have more close ties than people in past generations. Therefore, the second contribution of this paper is the confirmation of Wellman's theory that people who regularly use Facebook changed the limits defined by the Dunbar's Number. ...
... Therefore, it is unlikely that the cognitive capacities of modern humans are limited to 150 meaningful relationships, as stated by Dunbar. Furthermore, Wellman [3] argues that the Dunbar's number is up through disagreeing with the Dunbar's claim that relationships are structured as a series of concentric circles of support, sympathy, affinity and activity that scale relative to each other by a factor of 3. He argues that relationships are not tiered because in reality relationships among individuals are more complicated than a situation that the closest layer only provides support while the next closest layer only provides sympathy. ...
... When comparing these values with the Dunbar's social circles [2], [13]- [15], it is clear that people today have more individuals in social circles because of worldwide penetration of Internet and OSNs, as well as the availability of smartphones. Therefore, we confirmed Wellman's theory [3] Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. ...
This paper presents the “SmartSocial Dataset” which describes 1,826 Facebook users with lots of details, including their connections and their interactions (e.g., posts, likes, comments). We firstly present a detailed analysis of (i) descriptive and (ii) network characteristics of the “SmartSocial Dataset” to provide evidence for its representativeness. Afterwards, we analyse the relationship between social and behavioural characteristics of “SmartSocial Dataset” users and Benford’s Law as well as Dunbar’s Number, to test whether Facebook has the power to change natural (Benford) and anthropological (Dunbar) laws. We find that Fakebook’s features are aligned with the Benford’s Law but redefine the way how Dunbar’s Number is calculated. Finally, we demonstrate how those findings could help researchers and business practitioners who collect Facebook datasets in a way to indicate whether there is serious sampling problem with the dataset they collected.
... Unfortunately, this claim ignores the fact that these band groupings are unstable and purely ecological in origin-and are clearly embedded in a stable larger community such that band members are drawn only from this community (occasional visitors excepted) [2,[36][37][38]. The other has been to claim that the natural size of human communities must be much greater because we know many more than 150 individuals or because we can list many more individuals as Facebook friends [39]. In the latter case, the issue involves confusion between real social relationships and the capacity to remember faces/ names. ...
... So how is it that many claim that digital media do yield larger social networks [39,82]? It seems likely that there are two quite separate issues here. ...
The social brain hypothesis (an explanation for the evolution of brain size in primates) predicts that humans typically cannot maintain more than 150 relationships at any one time. The constraint is partly cognitive (ultimately determined by some aspect of brain volume) and partly one of time. Friendships (but not necessarily kin relationships) are maintained by investing time in them, and failure to do so results in an inexorable deterioration in the quality of a relationship. The Internet, and in particular the rise of social networking sites (SNSs), raises the possibility that digital media might allow us to circumvent some or all of these constraints. This allows us to test the importance of these constraints in limiting human sociality. Although the recency of SNSs means that there have been relatively few studies, those that are available suggest that, in general, the ability to broadcast to many individuals at once, and the possibilities this provides in terms of continuously updating our understanding of network members' behaviour and thoughts, do not allow larger networks to be maintained. This may be because only relatively weak quality relationships can be maintained without face-to-face interaction.
... It does not correlate with any feature marked by Spanish law. Rather, its proximity to Dunbar's number (an empirical-yet debated [13][14][15]-cognitive limit to the number of relationships that animals can have [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]) suggests an organic emergence of social complexity. ...
Social dynamics are shaped by each person's actions, as well as by collective trends that emerge when individuals are brought together. These latter kind of influences escape anyone's control. They are, instead, dominated by aggregate societal properties such as size, polarization, cohesion, or hierarchy. Such features add nuance and complexity to social structure, and might be present, or not, for societies of different sizes. How do societies become more complex? Are there specific scales at which they are reorganized into emergent entities? In this paper we introduce the {\em social complexity spectrum}, a methodological tool, inspired by theoretical considerations about dynamics on complex networks, that addresses these questions empirically. We use as a probe a sociolinguistic process that has unfolded over decades within the north-western Spanish region of Galicia, across populations of varied sizes. We estimate how societal complexity increases monotonously with population size; and how specific scales stand out, at which complexity would build up faster. These scales are noted as dips in our spectra, similarly to missing wavelengths in light spectroscopy. Also, `red-' and `blue-shifts' take place as the general population shifted from more rural to more urban settings. These shifts help us sharpen our observations. Besides specific results around social complexity build-up, our work introduces a powerful tool to be applied in further study cases.
... Even if it is generally accepted that variability across individuals is high and that the emergence of the internet and online social networks in particular, together with improved and lower cost means of transportation, have resulted in higher estimated numbers for network size today, considerably outnumbering Dunbar's proposal (Wellman, 2012), as core networks have been analysed, much lower variation has been observed. Confidant networks are more family based than other more general networks (Boase and Ikeda, 2012;Litwin and Stoeckel, 2014;Marsden, 2018), and are composed of stronger, more intimate, and resilient ties (Marsden, 1987;Mollenhorst et al., 2014;Small et al., 2015). ...
Research into migration and social networks has suggested that migrants are relationally more vulnerable than non-migrants, especially those in endogamous couples. However, non-probability samples and lack of data about partners' networks have often impeded rigorous testing. This paper analyses the influence of migration and mixedness (unions between two persons from different geographical origins) on some compositional and structural measures of the core discussion networks of the adult population in Spain, paying special attention to the partner’s role. Data from the 2013 Spanish General Social Survey (SGSS) were used. A graph census shows the predominance of complete graphs both for endogamous and exogamous couples, but more clearly in the case of natives. Multivariate models prove that, in general, Spaniards in mixed unions seem less partner-dependent, whereas endogamous immigrants seem the most affected by the effects of the geographical mobility on relational vulnerability.
... All communication activities, including face-to-face interactions and social media use, are competing for the individual's attention (Zulli, 2018). Considering the time-intensive requirements for maintaining a friendship, it may be more time efficient for individuals to keep in touch via social media instead of other communication channels (e.g., face-to-face interactions, texting, phone calls; Wellman, 2012). Additionally, because Finsta is thought to present a more authentic and realistic version of users when compared to traditional Instagram, one does not have to invest as much energy into self-presentation in their Finsta interactions (Duffy & Chan, 2019). ...
Research on the relationships between social media use and loneliness has produced mixed findings, in part because people use social media in different ways. Finsta is a private Instagram account followed only by a small group of the user’s friends and is considered to be a more authentic form of social media. The purpose of the present study was to examine the differential associations of Instagram and Finsta use with social and emotional loneliness and to investigate off-line engagement as a potential mediator of these associations. With data from an online survey given to N = 330 emerging adults, a series of hierarchical linear regressions showed that Instagram use negatively predicted and Finsta use positively predicted social loneliness, whereas neither were associated with emotional loneliness. Furthermore, whereas Finsta use was not associated with off-line social engagement with friends (OSE-friend), Instagram use was positively associated with this variable. In addition, results showed that off-line social support with friends partially mediated the relationship between Instagram use and social loneliness. The findings imply that all social media are not created equal; even within the same platform (Instagram), differential associations were found with social loneliness depending on the type of account used.
... SD = 2,256.90). Although the cut-off values for the number of friends in small and medium social network groups are higher than those identified by Dunbar (2011) and Dunbar et al. (2015), researchers have recognized that there is wide variance around the mean network sizes (e.g., for the mean network size of 150, the lower and upper bounds are 100 and 250) (Dunbar, 2018) and are likely to be higher in an online context (Wellman, 2012). As such, the difference in values for social network sizes between our study and those identified by Dunbar (2011) and Dunbar et al. (2015) is unlikely to be of major concern. ...
Existing meta-analyses have shown that the relationship between social media use and self-esteem is negative, but at very small effect sizes, suggesting the presence of moderators that change the relationship between social media use and self-esteem. Employing principles from social comparison and evolutionary mismatch theories, we propose that the social network sizes one has on social media play a key role in the relationship between social media use and self-esteem. In our study (N = 123), we showed that social media use was negatively related to self-esteem, but only when their social network size was within an evolutionarily familiar level. Social media use was not related to self-esteem when people’s social networks were at evolutionarily novel sizes. The data supported both social comparison and evolutionary mismatch theories and elucidated the small effect size found for the relationship between social media use and self-esteem in current literature. More critically, the findings of this study highlight the need to consider evolutionarily novel stimuli that are present on social media to better understand the behaviors of people in this social environment.
... distant) relationships are viewed with greater trust, stronger memories, and deeper support , contributing to the fundamental distinctions between "close" vs. "distal" others (Trope & Liberman, 2010) and "strong" vs. "weak" ties (Granovetter, 1973). While there are many dimensions that can contribute to the depth or value of a given relationship (Fingerman, 2009;Wellman, 2012), here we focus on perceived closeness, or the extent to which another individual is perceived as close (Triê _ u et al., 2019). From this lens, romantic partners and loyal friends are likely to be perceived as very close, whereas the barista at the local coffee stop is unlikely to be seen as close-unless one has established a rapport from regular visits. ...
The elevated satisfaction that comes from interacting with close ties, as opposed to distal ties, is well-established in past research. What remains less clear is how the quality of daily interactions between close versus distal ties may vary as a function of personality. Drawing on data from a 2-week experience sampling study ( N = 108 participants, N = 7755 observations), we consider how trait rejection sensitivity (RS)—or the tendency to worry about potential social rejection—interacts with perceived closeness and interaction channel (i.e., face-to-face vs. technology-mediated) in daily life. We find that individuals who are high (vs. low) in rejection sensitivity not only view distal tie interactions as less satisfying, they also perceive close tie exchanges as more enjoyable and supportive—but only for technology-mediated (vs. face-to-face) interactions. We also find that individuals who are high in rejection sensitivity have higher variability in the perceived quality of their interactions. These findings demonstrate the interlocked factors of personality tendencies, perceived closeness, and interaction channel in shaping the variability in the quality of daily interactions.
... A number of commentators have voiced opinions consistent with this idea. Wellman [540], for example, suggests that "social media have increased the carrying capacity of relationships, with heavy internet users having more close ties" (p. 174). ...
Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent-world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind heeds the call of the early Web Science pioneers by expanding the interdisciplinary scope of Web Science, specifically, to accommodate the disciplines of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. There is a substantial literature to support this expansionist agenda. Given the centrality of cognition to our species-specific capabilities, as well as the level of public and scientific interest in the Web, now is arguably an appropriate time to review this literature and explicate the nature of the linkages that connect the science of the Web with the sciences of the mind.
... Dunbar's "cognitive limit" no longer holds in our modern interconnected world, where the nature of our personal networks has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Estimates now suggest that an individual can have a mean number of well over 600 connections (Wellman, 2012). Add to this, the multiplier effects that come with interconnectivity and the user interface of social media. ...
The ubiquity of social media has created both opportunities and challenges for businesses and societies. For product brands, ideas, or campaigns to gain traction on social media platforms, they need to capture attention. This is often accomplished by creating and disseminating compelling information, even disinformation, on these platforms. Strategies that drive this attention economy are often not obvious. The monetization of disinformation is explored here through a case study on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the analysis of a dataset of 94,993 unique online articles. When combined these methods allow for the evaluation and exploration of various tactics that contribute to the evolving GMO narrative and their potential application to other topics. Preliminary results suggest that a small group of alternative health and pro-conspiracy sites received more total engagements on social media than sites commonly regarded as media outlets on the topic of GMOs. Other externalities observed include continued social and political controversy that surround the GMO topic as well as the growth of additional product and marketing approaches such as “non-GMO” verification.
... Consistent with Dunbar's number, social networks are constrained by the number of social relationships that can be functionally sustained, typically between 80 and 300 nodes (Arnaboldi et al., 2013;LaRose et al., 2014;Liang & Fu, 2015;Mac Carron et al., 2016;Miritello, Lara, et al., 2013a;Sandel et al., 2016;M. Stephens & Poorthuis, 2015;cf., Manago, Taylor, & Greenfield, 2012;Wellman, 2012). In addition to support from research on ordinary social networks (e.g., Dunbar & Sosis, 2018), various studies of mediated network topologies have tended to support these ranges of social ties (Arnaboldi et al., 2013). ...
The study of personal relationships has traditionally relied on self‐reports or observations of face‐to‐face interaction. Digital media increasingly provide the ability to trace communication and relationships at scale. Such methods portend significant theoretical and methodological challenges, as well as potential. As a way of illustrating such potential, big data approaches to the select traditional relational concepts of routine relating, propinquity, homophily, small world, and reciprocity are reviewed. The fields of communication and personal relationships will need to inform such research by developing their own interdisciplinary relationships with geographic information sciences, computational linguistics, and computer sciences or cede a significant frontier of their field to these other disciplines.
... For example, the famous Dunbar's number, which estimates the number of active relationships, is 150 [24]. More recent studies seem to indicate that the average number of acquaintances is larger, ranging from 250 to 1500 (see [25,26,27] and references within). We propose to set p and q so that the neighborhood size 2p(p + 1) + q is about 600, the value reported in [26]. ...
One of the key features of small-world networks is the ability to route messages in a few hops, using a decentralized algorithm in which each node has a limited knowledge of the topology. In 2000, Kleinberg proposed a model based on an augmented grid that asymptotically exhibits such a property. In this paper, we revisit the original model with the help of numerical simulations. Our approach is fueled by a new algorithm that can sample augmenting links in an almost constant time. The speed gain allows us to perform detailed numerical evaluations. We first observe that, in practice, the augmented scheme proposed by Kleinberg is more robust than what is predicted by the asymptotic behavior, even in very large finite grids. We also propose tighter bounds on the asymptotic performance of Kleinberg's greedy routing algorithm. We finally show that, if the model is fed with realistic parameters, the results are in line with real-life experiments.
... These studies led to vastly different estimates of average network size (see Table 1): from less than 100 (free recall; contact diaries for a limited period; online social networks) up to thousands (extrapolation from telephone book experiments or from prolonged contact diaries, participant observation), depending among others on the method of estimation, the characteristics of the sample, and the underlying definition of "knowing someone" (the network boundary). However, many studies found much higher averages than 150, concluding that Dunbar's number is on the low side for modern societies (e.g., Wellman, 2012). A mechanism that may explain the higher numbers given limited cognitive capacity is the use of compression heuristics among humans (Brashears, 2013), allowing the storage of larger amounts of information about social relationships in the brain. ...
Personal network researchers have extensively studied the characteristics and effects of individuals’ closest relationships, but they have paid much less attention to broader acquaintanceship networks, despite evidence that weak ties can also provide social support. In this paper we focus on one aspect of these networks: acquaintanceship volume. We estimate its distributional parameters for a large, representative sample of the general population of Spain, explore its variation across social groups as well as its implications for social support availability. We designed a survey instrument based on the Network Scale-Up Method and implemented it in a national survey in Spain. Our results suggest that Spaniards have approximately 530 acquaintances, with a large inter-individual variation, comparable to the estimates reported for the American population. Acquaintanceship volume varies with gender, age, education, and income. These differences are partially related to the unequal participation of social groups in voluntary associations, confirming the civic value of such associations, and in employment. Even with similar core network size, acquaintanceship volume increases the likelihood of having adequate social support available, suggesting that broader acquaintanceship networks also structure individual outcomes.
... With the advent of different types of super social networking services developing one after another, people have once again picked up the topic for discussion [43], [44]. Many researchers have investigated how tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, have changed our capacity to handle social connections using the empirical study [45]- [47]. Here, Fig. 5(a) and (b) also shows the shadow of Dunbar's number on Sina-Weibo. ...
Social media analytics has drawn new quantitative insights of human activity patterns. Many applications of social media analytics, from pandemic prediction to earthquake response, require an in-depth understanding of how these patterns change when human encounter unfamiliar conditions. In this paper, we select two earthquakes in China as the social context in Sina-Weibo (or Weibo for short), the largest Chinese microblog site. After proposing a formalized Weibo information flow model to represent the information spread on Weibo, we study the information spread from three main perspectives: individual characteristics, the types of social relationships between interactive participants, and the topology of real interaction networks. The quantitative analyses draw the following conclusions. First, the shadow of Dunbar's number is evident in the "declared friends/followers" distributions, and the number of each participant's friends/followers who also participated in the earthquake information dissemination show the typical power-law distribution, indicating a rich-gets-richer phenomenon. Second, an individual's number of followers is the most critical factor in user influence. Strangers are very important forces for disseminating real-time news after an earthquake. Third, two types of real interaction networks share the scale-free and small-world property, but with a looser organizational structure. In addition, correlations between different influence groups indicate that when compared with other online social media, the discussion on Weibo is mainly dominated and influenced by verified users.
... A number of commentators have voiced opinions consistent with this idea. Wellman [540], for example, suggests that "social media have increased the carrying capacity of relationships, with heavy internet users having more close ties" (p. 174). ...
Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent--world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.
... For example, the famous Dunbar's number, which estimates the number of active relationships, is 150 [4]. More recent studies seem to indicate that the average number of acquaintances is larger, ranging from 250 to 1500 (see [3,16,22] and references within). We propose to set p and q so that the neighborhood size 2p(p + 1) + q is about 600, the value reported in [16]. ...
One of the key features of small-worlds is the ability to route messages with few hops only using local knowledge of the topology. In 2000, Kleinberg proposed a model based on an augmented grid that asymptotically exhibits such property. In this paper, we propose to revisit the original model from a simulation-based perspective. Our approach is fueled by a new algorithm that uses dynamic rejection sampling to draw augmenting links. The speed gain offered by the algorithm enables a detailed numerical evaluation. We show for example that in practice, the augmented scheme proposed by Kleinberg is more robust than predicted by the asymptotic behavior, even for very large finite grids. We also propose tighter bounds on the performance of Kleinberg's routing algorithm. At last, we show that fed with realistic parameters, the model gives results in line with real-life experiments.
... It has been suggested that, even if this limit on personal network size exists in the face-to-face world, the rise of online SNSs has circumvented at least some of these constraints and has thus allowed us to increase dramatically the number of people we can have as friends [9,[37][38][39]. Because there are significant limits on the number of people we can talk to at any one time in the offline world [40][41][42] as well as on the amount of time we have available for social interaction [25,43], there is inevitably a limit on the size of our egocentric social networks when relationships require time investment. ...
The social brain hypothesis has suggested that natural social network sizes may have a characteristic size in humans. This is determined in part by cognitive constraints and in part by the time costs of servicing relationships. Online social networking offers the potential to break through the glass ceiling imposed by at least the second of these, potentially enabling us to maintain much larger social networks. This is tested using two separate UK surveys, each randomly stratified by age, gender and regional population size. The data show that the size and range of online egocentric social networks, indexed as the number of Facebook friends, is similar to that of offline face-to-face networks. For one sample, respondents also specified the number of individuals in the inner layers of their network (formally identified as support clique and sympathy group), and these were also similar in size to those observed in offline networks. This suggests that, as originally proposed by the social brain hypothesis, there is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communication advantages of online media are unable to overcome. In practical terms, it may reflect the fact that real (as opposed to casual) relationships require at least occasional face-to-face interaction to maintain them.
... The number of 'friends' a person has on Facebook, for example, is often significantly larger than the size of a person's real-world social network (Kanai et al., 2012). This difference in size is partially attributable to the greater ease with 55 which online vs real-world social connections can be initiated and maintained, but other factors such as differences in the purpose of maintaining online vs real-world social networks could also play a role (Lewis et al., 2008;Wellman, 2012). There are also inconsistencies between various measures of real-world SNS. ...
The social brain hypothesis proposes that the large size of the primate neocortex evolved to support complex and demanding
social interactions. Accordingly, recent studies have reported correlations between the size of an individual’s social network
and the density of gray matter (GM) in regions of the brain implicated in social cognition. However, the reported relationships
between GM density and social group size are somewhat inconsistent with studies reporting correlations in different brain
regions. One factor that might account for these discrepancies is the use of different measures of social network size (SNS).
This study used several measures of SNS to assess the relationships SNS and GM density. The second goal of this study was
to test the relationship between social network measures and functional brain activity. Participants performed a social closeness
task using photos of their friends and unknown people. Across the VBM and functional magnetic resonance imaging analyses,
individual differences in SNS were consistently related to structural and functional differences in three regions: the left
amygdala, right amygdala and the right entorhinal/ventral anterior temporal cortex.
Present theory suggests that neighborhoods form through frequent, repeated face-to-face interactions among people in groups of spatially co-located residences. Over time, layered interactions create relational identities (through face-to-face contact) and categorical identities (through perceived similarities). Neighborhood identity, when present, indicates a union of both relational and categorical identities generated through shared social experiences. Unfortunately, we cannot directly ask the deceased about their neighbors; however, we can reconstruct likely zones of frequent, repeated face-to-face interaction and then test those assumptions using archaeological data. This analysis reconstructs neighborhoods at Caracol, Belize through the application of least cost analysis and k-means clustering. This spatial reconstruction relies on interpretations of interactions occurring near residences, in adjacent terraced agricultural fields, at public plazas in districts, and on the way to and from service-providing district architecture. Reconstructed neighborhoods, based on relational identity, are then tested archaeologically with excavated material from contexts related to categorical identity. Inter- and intra-neighborhood comparisons of ritual deposits from cache and burial deposits within 59 excavated residential plazuela housemound groups situated among eight sampled neighborhoods test and validate these reconstructed neighborhoods at Caracol, Belize by demonstrating, with statistical significance, more similarities within than between reconstructed neighborhoods.
Open Access @ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416523000302
The Central and Southern Balkans
played a significant role in the introduction
and development of social complexity in
Europe. This is indicated by buildings, burials,
and artifacts. During the Neolithic period, the first
glimpses of communal differences appeared and
eventually developed into tribal elites and hierarchical
tribal kingdoms in the Chalcolithic (Copper Age),
Bronze Age, and Iron Age. These prehistoric stages witnessed a variety
of technological, economic, and social changes that
permitted the advancement and differentiation of
individuals and groups. They distinguished themselves
from one another by decorated structures, prestigious
objects, and lavish funerary rituals that signified the
different statuses or roles they held in society. In this
chapter, we provide an overview of these changes from
the end of the seventh to the middle of the first
millennium BC, focusing specifically on the central
southern parts of the Balkans.
New scientific research and major discoveries on
the eastern border of the Carpathian Basin—including
the Early Bronze Age burial mounds, the multi-layered
settlements of the Middle Bronze Age, the
Late Bronze Age mega-forts, and an Early Iron Age
center—permit us to paint a more nuanced picture
of a world of peace and war. Following Early and
Middle Bronze Age sociopolitical developments, the
Late Bronze Age saw the rise of powerful hierarchical
leaders who commanded the construction and regular
maintenance of massive earthen fortifications and
many times ordered formal armies with professional
soldiers supplied with specialized weaponry to perform
large-scale sieges.
In order to address the origins of southern Balkan Iron Age societies—the Illyrians, Paeonians, Dardanians, Thracians, and Macedonians and the extent of their hierarchical organization, we must first address the nature and evolution of their political systems. How were they organized? How was power shared or exercised among and between individuals? Was one’s power and standing based on military prowess, religion, control of trade, all of these, or none?
The multidisciplinary field of personal relationships has focused primarily on strong ties (romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships). However, acquaintances (weak ties) are pervasive in people's lives, contribute to well‐being, influence strong ties, and can become strong ties over time. This review article synthesizes several areas of literature about the role of acquaintances (weak ties) in the web of relationships and about the formation of acquaintanceships. The terms acquaintances and weak ties are used interchangeably in this article to refer to the type of relationship that exists in the peripheral layers of social networks. In the first section, I discuss the literature on factors associated with the size of people's acquaintance network, needs met by acquaintances (compared to those of closer ties), health and happiness benefits of interaction with acquaintances, and the dark side of acquaintances including having unwanted acquaintances. In the second section, I discuss how acquaintanceships are formed, and particularly the type that can develop into a closer tie. This section summarizes research from the literatures on friendship formation, relationship initiation, attraction, and first interactions of dyads at zero‐acquaintance. I end the article by identifying several research topics on acquaintances that could be studied by the next generation of scholars.
Originally conceived to highlight problematic labor relations that required emotions, the term emotional labor is now deployed to describe emotional relations that require problematic labor. In this paper, we identify how digital platforms have amplified this inverted form of emotional labor and spawned a phenomenon we term technoliberal managerialism, or the use of the connection, quantification, control, tracking, and optimization capacities of technology to manage everyday interactions. Through the analysis of viral self-help Twitter threads, a mobile application, and an algorithmic prototype we trace how the resulting habituation rewards happiness, efficiency, and uniformity at the expense of moodiness, messiness, and difference. Ultimately, we argue that going off scripts and embracing the “fuck up” can help resist technoliberalism.
Emotionally-responsive chatbots are marketed as agents with which one can form emotional connections. They can also become weak ties in the outer layers of one's acquaintance network and available for social support. In this experiment, which was designed to study the acquaintance process, we randomly assigned 417 participants into three conditions: face-to-face (FTF) chat with a human, online chat with a human, and online chat with a commercially-available, emotionally-responsive chatbot, Replika. After a 20-min getting-acquainted chat, participants reported their affective state and relational evaluations of the chat. Additionally, all chats were recorded and text analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program. In all conditions, participants reported moderate levels of positive emotions and low levels of negative emotions. Those who chatted FTF with a human reported significantly more negative emotions than those who chatted with a bot. However, those who chatted with a human also reported more homophily with and liking of their chat partner and that their partner was more responsive. Meanwhile, participants had fewest conversational concerns with the chatbot. These findings have implications for future computer-mediated interaction studies: conversations with chatbots appear to have different affordances and effects on chatter enjoyment and conversational concerns in getting-acquainted contexts. These results may help designers improve reception and marketability for chatbots in consumer markets.
This volume addresses current concerns about the climate and environmental sustainability by exploring one of the key drivers of contemporary environmental problems: the role of status competition in generating what we consume, and what we throw away, to the detriment of the planet. Across time and space, humans have pursued social status in many different ways - through ritual purity, singing or dancing, child-bearing, bodily deformation, even headhunting. In many of the world's most consumptive societies, however, consumption has become closely tied to how individuals build and communicate status. Given this tight link, people will be reluctant to reduce consumption levels – and environmental impact -- and forego their ability to communicate or improve their social standing. Drawing on cross-cultural and archaeological evidence, this book asks how a stronger understanding of the links between status and consumption across time, space, and culture might bend the curve towards a more sustainable future.
Spatializing Social Media charts the theoretical and methodological challenges in analyzing and visualizing social media data mapped to geographic areas. It introduces the reader to concepts, theories, and methods that sit at the crossroads between spatial and social network analysis to unpack the conceptual differences between online and face-to-face social networks and the nonlinear effects triggered by social activity that overlaps online and offline. The book is divided into four sections, with the first accounting for the differences between space (the geometrical arrangements that structure and enable forms of interaction) and place (the mechanisms through which social meanings are attached to physical locations). The second section covers the rationale of social network analysis and the ontological differences, stating that relationships, more than individual and independent attributes, are key to understanding of social behavior. The third section covers a range of case studies that successfully mapped social media activity to geographically situated areas and considers the inflection of homophilous dependencies across online and offline social networks. The fourth and last section of the book explores a range of networks and discusses methods for and approaches to plotting a social network graph onto a map, including the purpose-built R package Spatial Social Media. The book takes a non-mathematical approach to social networks and spatial statistics suitable for postgraduate students in sociology, psychology and the social sciences.
Anfang der 1990er Jahren stellt Dunbar, ein auf Primatenforschung spezialisierter britischer Anthropologe und Evolutionsbiologe, die später sogenannte » Soziale-Gehirn- Hypothese « (engl. social brain hypothesis) auf, welche die Anzahl der Freunde als eine Eigenschaft und Funktion des Neocortex beschreibt, da es sowohl kognitive als auch zeitliche Begrenzungen gebe, Freundschaften aufrecht zu erhalten. Hierfür zieht Dunbar Studien über die Gruppengröße von 36 verschiedenen Primaten heran und korreliert diese mit der Gehirngröße der entsprechenden Primaten, um daraus eine mathematische Formel zu generieren. Mit deren Hilfe bestimmt er die » durchschnittliche Gruppengröße « für Menschen mit 147,8, wobei meist die aufgerundete Zahl von 150 verwandt wird.
Since about five years, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Cambridge, U.S., and the Chronic Collaborative Care Network (C3N) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati, U.S., have been working together to improve care for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients by harnessing methods of computational social science. The goal of this contribution is (1) to present an approach in measuring communication patterns and sentiments within online communities of IBD patients, (2) to analyze the enablers for a better connectedness of community members, and (3) to introduce a prototype application of a collective intelligent online network for IBD patients, named “YouMeIBD”. The mobile application, developed within an interdisciplinary student class at MIT and four other universities, aims to improve the connectedness, well-being and diffusion of innovations in a community of IBD patients.
The article discusses human groupings from the perspective of social geometry, i.e., social numbers and their significance in social life. It offers a generalized and interdisciplinary analysis of one as a social zero, then of social numbers two, three, and four, as well as of larger numbers. Furthermore, this article discusses the basic forms of sociality and special emphasis is put on qualitative changes that occur through quantitative changes in the social number of configurations. This is achieved through the accumulated scientific knowledge of human evolutionary history and its influence on human groupings.
To study the effective information of social network, based on the theory of node degree distribution and node strength, a method to analyze the effective information in social network was proposed. First, based on Dunbar's number, the node effective information function (NEIF) together with node strength to describe information patterns of social network was proposed. By combining the NEIF with the node degree distribution function (NDDF) which is obtained from Twitter's social graphic, the social networks' effective information was analyzed. Finally, by using effective information function, the limitations and characteristics of effective information in social networks were estimated, and guidelines for better social networking were provided. The research shows that the Dunbar's number is between 210 and 220, which has exceeded the 150 law. At the same time, the effective information of social network tends to be a specific value. ©, 2015, Beijing University of Technology. All right reserved.
This study examined encouraged and inhibited social feedback behaviors based on the theories of the buffering effect and the bystander effect. A system program was used to collect personal data and social feedback from a Facebook data set to test the research model. The results revealed that the buffering effect induced a positive relationship between social network size and feedback gained from friends when people's social network size was under a certain cognitive constraint. For people with a social network size that exceeds this cognitive constraint, the bystander effect may occur, in which having more friends may inhibit social feedback. In this study, two social psychological theories were applied to explain social feedback behavior on Facebook, and it was determined that social network size and social feedback exhibited no consistent linear relationship.
Accelerating social complexity in combination with outstanding problems like attention scarcity and information asymmetry contribute to human error in decision making. Democratic institutions and markets both operate under the assumption that human beings are informed rational decision makers working with perfect information, situation awareness, and unlimited neurological capacity. We argue that, although these assumptions are incorrect, they could to a large extent be mediated by a process of cyborgization, up to and including electing cyborgs into positions of authority.
The paper starts from considering relations between machines and human thought. How do the machine deterministic, the metaphoric and instrumental visions emerge in intellectual history. This issue is part of the general topic of how do man made technical tools influence the general frameworks of human relations and cognition, i.e. the general architecture of the mind. Three visions did emerge about the role of the WEB in human affairs. According to the techno-optimist vision the advent of the Internet fundamentally changed our human relations and our learning methods in a positive manner. According to the techno-pessimists this change is indeed real but it goes in the wrong direction. It makes us cognitively superficial and patchwork like, and emotionally less engaged in our connections. According to the bio-optimist vision the changes appear through the use of our already existing biological architectures. The world of the new information technology has an innovative effect on humans, but does not radically change them. Regarding of our own studies, first the results concerning Ego-centered networks are presented. Using the theoretical framework proposed by Robin Dunbar about networks with layers of varying strength, our studies had shown that the new ICT tools mainly widen our relations in the superficial layers. Regarding the personality determinants of network size, we mainly find that even in the context of new media we still practice strong ties mainly with people with whom we have secure attachment relations. Changes in the world of learning and memory in the context of the computer and internet access is a much studied aspect in contemporary psychology. The presence of the new distant accessible knowledge systems and the changes in the world of search did change our attitudes regarding personal storage of knowledge. Regarding the much debated issue of the efficiency of hypertext reading, our own studies - beside the trivially that well organized hypertext is easier to remember - showed the importance of individual differences here as well. Individual differences in working memory, especially visual working memory, have a basic role in determining our recognition of the underlying structure of hypertexts. On the whole, we find that in our relationships networks we tend to be relatively conservative, technology mainly serves as a tool to maintain relations. Regarding reading, however, the situation is different. Easily accessible and downloadable texts may make our reading more superficial. Thus we have to rethink relations between man and text in the new world of easy texts, and we have to design research that would study not merely occasional, episodic effects, but long term structural effects of the new media and new access as well.
This article considers claims made by various authors that the use of filtering and recommendation technology on the Internet can deprive certain communities of feedback, and instead amplify groups' viewpoints, leading to polarization of opinion across communities, and increases in extremism. The ‘echo chamber’ arguments of Cass Sunstein are taken as representative of this point of view, and examined in detail in the context of a range of research, theoretical and empirical, quantitative and qualitative, in political science and the sociology of religion, from the last quarter century. The conclusion is that the case has not been made either (a) that echo chambers are necessarily harmful, or (b) that the Internet is complicit in their formation.
Jelen tanulmanyban az egocentrikus halok felterkepezesi lehetősegeit vizsgaljuk meg. Előszor attekintjuk az egot korulvevő kapcsolati retegeket, majd azokat az eszkozoket, amelyekkel ezek a retegek feltarhatok. Ezen eszkozok kozul reszletesen a nevgeneratorokat mutatjuk be, de roviden kiterunk egyeb, az egokozpontu kapcsolathalok vizsgalatara alkalmas modszerekre is. Vegul a nevgeneratoros vizsgalatokkal kapcsolatos nehany modszertani kerdest tekintunk at.
The paper starts from the classical psychological observation that learning processes show some sort of self organization, not merely a man subject of environmental influences. Two moments provide a special frame for these self organizational processes: the recognition of critical or sensitive periods of development, and the system of natural pedagogy based on a cooperation between the child and his social environment. The paper analyzes the critical periods in attachment, emotions, and cognition. and emphasizes that the role of puberty as a second critical period should be reanalyzed.
In the field of epidemiology, much attention has been given to the reduction of random or systematic errors in study design, analysis, and reporting. This article reviews relevant literature on group work processes. The review orients attention toward optimizing group work processes to enhance group decision making and optimize the conduct of epidemiologic work in the era of team science.
The review contrasts interactive open group work with group aggregate work. We define the latter as occurring without member to member communication. The impacts of group characteristics on process issues are examined.
Group characteristics such as purpose, modality, size, and member incentives are shown to influence the likely optimal group structure for varying tasks. Open group work allows rapid communication and interactive feedback as well as the emergence of a collective intelligence above that of the individual members. However, productivity may be limited by large open group size and the multiple dyads of communication, limiting cognitive diversity and human resource capital. Furthermore, group-level biases and bias may be introduced within the group. Little quantitative work on these issues has been conducted in the epidemiologic work setting, but recent experimental research in other areas of science and management indicates that structured protocols to support dynamic group work can improve group decisions. The merit of often highly accurate group aggregate approaches, with parallel independent individual inputs such as crowd sourcing is becoming increasingly recognized. We outline several examples in recent medical research.
We outline principles that should be explicitly considered when setting up new work groups in epidemiology and recommend that further work on these issues be conducted.
This paper is an author response to three commentaries, by Robert Kraut and Itamar Rosenn (2012), Barry Wellman (2012) and Mark van Vugt (2012), on our article entitled 'Relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives' (Sutcliffe, Dunbar, Binder, & Arrow, 2012).
We describe an interview-based data-collection procedure for social network analysis designed to aid gathering information about the people known by a respondent and reduce problems with data integrity and respondent burden. This procedure, a participant-aided network diagram (sociogram), is an extension of traditional name generators. Although such a diagram can be produced through computer-assisted programs for interviewing (CAPIs) and low technology (i.e., paper), we demonstrate both practical and methodological reasons for keeping high technology in the lab and low technology in the field. We provide some general heuristics that can reduce the time needed to complete a name generator. We present findings from our Connected Lives field study to illustrate this procedure and compare to an alternative method for gathering network data.
There is some panic in the United States about a possible decline in social connectivity. The authors used two American national surveys to analyze how changes in the number of friends are related to changes in Internet use. The authors found that friendships continue to be abundant among adult Americans between the ages of 25 to 74 and that they grew from 2002 to 2007. This trend is similar among Internet nonusers, light users, moderate users, and heavy users and across communication contexts: offline, virtual only, and migratory from online to offline. Heavy users are particularly active, having the most friends both online and offline. Intracohort change consistently outweighs cohort replacement in explaining overall growth in friendship.
We apply our network scale-up model to estimate the number of people in the U.S. who know someone who experienced the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the number of people who know someone who knows someone who experienced those attacks.
In contrast to technologically deterministic approaches that focus on how communication technology affects social relationships, this paper examines how individuals draw on a variety of commonly used communication media in conjunction with in-person contact to stay connected to their personal networks. I term this use of multiple communication media the 'personal communication system'. Findings are based on a random sample telephone survey of 2200 adults living throughout the continental USA. Descriptive statistics show that despite the popularity of email and mobile phones, in-person and landline phone contact are still the most common ways of connecting with personal networks. Multivariate analysis reveals a more complex picture of media use, showing that the extent to which each medium is used varies to differing degrees with the size and diversity of personal networks. Hierarchical cluster analysis is used to explore the possibility that individuals may have different types of personal communication systems. Results show only two distinct clusters: those who draw heavily on all types of media to connect with their personal networks and those who draw less heavily on all types of media. Heavy communicators typically have larger and more diverse personal networks than light communicators. When taken together, the results presented in this paper suggest that rather than radically altering relationships, communication technology is embedded in social networks as part of a larger communication system that individuals use to stay socially connected.
Psychological studies of relationships tend to focus on specific types of close personal relationships (romantic, parent-offspring, friendship) and examine characteristics of both the individuals and the dyad. This paper looks more broadly at the wider range of relationships that constitute an individual's personal social world. Recent work on the composition of personal social networks suggests that they consist of a series of layers that differ in the quality and quantity of relationships involved. Each layer increases relationship numbers by an approximate multiple of 3 (5-15-50-150) but decreasing levels of intimacy (strong, medium, and weak ties) and frequency of interaction. To account for these regularities, we draw on both social and evolutionary psychology to argue that relationships at different layers serve different functions and have different cost-benefit profiles. At each layer, the benefits are asymptotic but the costs of maintaining a relationship at that level (most obviously, the time that has to be invested in servicing it) are roughly linear with the number of relationships. The trade-off between costs and benefits at a given level, and across the different types of demands and resources typical of different levels, gives rise to a distribution of social effort that generates and maintains a hierarchy of layered sets of relationships within social networks. We suggest that, psychologically, these trade-offs are related to the level of trust in a relationship, and that this is itself a function of the time invested in the relationship.
Using 2006 General Social Survey data, the authors compare levels of segregation by race and along other dimensions of potential social cleavage in the contemporary United States. Americans are not as isolated as the most extreme recent estimates suggest. However, hopes that "bridging" social capital is more common in broader acquaintanceship networks than in core networks are not supported. Instead, the entire acquaintanceship network is perceived by Americans to be about as segregated as the much smaller network of close ties. People do not always know the religiosity, political ideology, family behaviors, or socioeconomic status of their acquaintances, but perceived social divisions on these dimensions are high, sometimes rivaling racial segregation in acquaintanceship networks. The major challenge to social integration today comes from the tendency of many Americans to isolate themselves from others who differ on race, political ideology, level of religiosity, and other salient aspects of social identity.
Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a network-based technique for estimating traits in hard-to-reach populations, for example, the prevalence of HIV among drug injectors. In recent years RDS has been used in more than 120 studies in more than 20 countries and by leading public health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. Despite the widespread use and growing popularity of RDS, there has been little empirical validation of the methodology. Here we investigate the performance of RDS by simulating sampling from 85 known, network populations. Across a variety of traits we find that RDS is substantially less accurate than generally acknowledged and that reported RDS confidence intervals are misleadingly narrow. Moreover, because we model a best-case scenario in which the theoretical RDS sampling assumptions hold exactly, it is unlikely that RDS performs any better in practice than in our simulations. Notably, the poor performance of RDS is driven not by the bias but by the high variance of estimates, a possibility that had been largely overlooked in the RDS literature. Given the consistency of our results across networks and our generous sampling conditions, we conclude that RDS as currently practiced may not be suitable for key aspects of public health surveillance where it is now extensively applied.
Consequential strangers Personal networks and the personal communication system: Using multiple communication media to connect with personal networks
- M Blau
- K Fingerman
Blau, M., & Fingerman, K. (2009). Consequential strangers. New York: Norton. Boase, J. (2008). Personal networks and the personal communication system: Using multiple communication media to connect with personal networks. Information, Communication and Society, 11(4), 490–508.
The Colors of closeness. Paper presented at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference
- M Godbout
- T Kennedy
- B Wellman
- Y Zhang
Godbout, M., Kennedy, T., Wellman, B., & Zhang, Y. (2011). The Colors of closeness. Paper presented at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA.
Personal communities
- V Chua
- J Madej
- B Wellman
Chua, V., Madej, J., & Wellman, B. (2011). Personal communities. In P. Carrington & J. Scott (Eds.), Handbook of social network analysis (pp. 101–115). London: Sage.
Personal networks and the personal communication system: Using multiple communication media to connect with personal networks
- Boase