Related papers: The Stability of Transient Relationships
A fundamental question of any new relationship is, will it last? Transient relationships, recently defined by the authors, are an ideal type of social tie to explore this question: these relationships are characterized by distinguishable…
The social network maintained by a focal individual, or ego, is intrinsically dynamic and typically exhibits some turnover in membership over time as personal circumstances change. However, the consequences of such changes on the…
Using large-scale call detail records of anonymised mobile phone service subscribers with demographic and location information, we investigate how a long-distance residential move within the country affects the mobile communication patterns…
The friendship paradox states that in a social network, egos tend to have lower degree than their alters, or, "your friends have more friends than you do". Most research has focused on the friendship paradox and its implications for…
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…
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)…
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…
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…
Mobile phone communication as digital service generates ever-increasing datasets of human communication actions, which in turn allow us to investigate the structure and evolution of social interactions and their networks. These datasets can…
Each stage of the human life course is characterized by a distinctive pattern of social relations. We study how the intensity and importance of the closest social contacts vary across the life course, using a large database of mobile…
Social networks have turned out to be of fundamental importance both for our understanding human sociality and for the design of digital communication technology. However, social networks are themselves based on dyadic relationships and we…
We analyze a large-scale mobile phone call dataset containing information on the age, gender, and billing locality of users to get insight into social closeness in pairs of individuals of similar age. We show that in addition to using the…
The social brain hypothesis predicts that humans have an average of about 150 relationships at any given time. Within this 150, there are layers of friends of an ego, where the number of friends in a layer increases as the emotional…
Earlier attempts to investigate the changes of the role of friendship in different life stages have failed due to lack of data. We close this gap by using a large data set of mobile phone calls from a European country in 2007, to study how…
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…
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…
Social networks require active relationship maintenance if they are to be kept at a constant level of emotional closeness. For primates, including humans, failure to interact leads inexorably to a decline in relationship quality, and a…
Electronic communication records provide detailed information about temporal aspects of human interaction. Previous studies have shown that individuals' communication patterns have complex temporal structure, and that this structure has…
In human relations individuals' gender and age play a key role in the structures and dynamics of their social arrangements. In order to analyze the gender preferences of individuals in interaction with others at different stages of their…
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…