Related papers: The persistence of social signatures in human comm…
The structure of egocentric networks reflects the way people balance their need for strong, emotionally intense relationships and a diversity of weaker ties. Egocentric network structure can be quantified with 'social signatures', which…
Strong and supportive social relationships are fundamental to our well-being. However, there are costs to their maintenance, resulting in a trade-off between quality and quantity, a typical strategy being to put a lot of effort on a few…
In social networks, individuals constantly drop ties and replace them by new ones in a highly unpredictable fashion. This highly dynamical nature of social ties has important implications for processes such as the spread of information or…
In contrast to long-term relationships, far less is known about the temporal evolution of transient relationships, although these constitute a substantial fraction of people's communication networks. Previous literature suggests that…
Tie strengths in social networks are heterogeneous, with strong and weak ties playing different roles at both the network and the individual level. Egocentric networks, networks of relationships around a focal individual, exhibit a small…
The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…
How do networks of relationships evolve over time? We analyse a dataset tracking the social interactions of 900 individuals over four years. Despite continuous shifts in individual relationships, the macroscopic structural properties of the…
The personal network of relationships is structured in circles of friendships, that go from the most intense relationships to the least intense ones. While this is a well established result, little is known about the stability of those…
Temporal social networks are characterized by {heterogeneous} duration of contacts, which can either follow a power-law distribution, such as in face-to-face interactions, or a Weibull distribution, such as in mobile-phone communication.…
Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…
The structure of real-world social networks in large part determines the evolution of social phenomena, including opinion formation, diffusion of information and influence, and the spread of disease. Globally, network structure is…
Ego networks have proved to be a valuable tool for understanding the relationships that individuals establish with their peers, both in offline and online social networks. Particularly interesting are the cognitive constraints associated…
The Ego Network Model (ENM) is a model for the structural organisation of relationships, rooted in evolutionary anthropology, that is found ubiquitously in social contexts. It takes the perspective of a single user (Ego) and organises their…
Human social interaction is often intermittent. Two acquainted persons can have extended periods without social interaction punctuated by periods of repeated interaction. In this case, the repeated interaction can be characterized by a seed…
The Ego Network Model (ENM) describes how individuals organise their social relations in concentric circles (typically five) of decreasing intimacy, and it has been found almost ubiquitously in social networks, both offline and online. The…
The structure and dynamic of social network are largely determined by the heterogeneous interaction activity and social capital allocation of individuals. These features interplay in a non-trivial way in the formation of network and…
Recent research has shown the deep impact of the dynamics of human interactions (or temporal social networks) on the spreading of information, opinion formation, etc. In general, the bursty nature of human interactions lowers the…
Social networks are made out of strong and weak ties having very different structural and dynamical properties. But, what features of human interaction build a strong tie? Here we approach this question from an practical way by finding what…
Well-established cognitive models coming from anthropology have shown that, due to the cognitive constraints that limit our "bandwidth" for social interactions, humans organize their social relations according to a regular structure. In…
Humans are social animals and the interpersonal bonds formed between them are crucial for their development and well being in a society. These relationships are usually structured into several layers (Dunbar's layers of friendship)…