Persistence of social signatures in human communication

Abstract

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 distribution of an ego's network ties are not well understood. Here we use a unique 18-mo dataset that combines mobile phone calls and survey data to track changes in the ego networks and communication patterns of students making the transition from school to university or work. Our analysis reveals that individuals display a distinctive and robust social signature, captured by how interactions are distributed across different alters. Notably, for a given ego, these social signatures tend to persist over time, despite considerable turnover in the identity of alters in the ego network. Thus, as new network members are added, some old network members either are replaced or receive fewer calls, preserving the overall distribution of calls across network members. This is likely to reflect the consequences of finite resources such as the time available for communication, the cognitive and emotional effort required to sustain close relationships, and the ability to make emotional investments.quantitative sociology | personal relationships S ocial relationships play an important functional role in human society both at the collective level and by providing benefits to individuals. In particular, it appears that having strong and supportive relationships, characterized by closeness and emotional intensity, is essential for health and well-being in both humans and other primates (1, 2). At the same time, there is a higher cost to maintaining closer relationships, reflected in the amount of effort required to maintain a relation at the desired level of emotional closeness. Because of this, the number of emotionally intense relationships is typically small. Moreover, it has been suggested that ego networks, the sets of ties individuals (egos) have to their friends and family (alters), may be subject to more general constraints associated with limits on human abilities to interact with large numbers of alters (3-5). Although there are obvious constraints on the time available for interactions (5-7), additional constraints may also arise through limits on memory capacity (3, 8) or other cognitive abilities (9, 10).Irrespective of the specific mechanisms that act to constrain ego networks, it is reasonable to ask whether such mechanisms shape these networks in similar ways under different circumstances, giving rise to some characteristic features that persist over time despite network turnover. Here, we explore this question with a detailed analysis of the communication patterns within ego networks in an empirical setting that results in large membership turnover and changes in the closeness of relationships. In particular, we focus on the way that egos divide their communication efforts among alters and how persistent the observed patterns are over time. We call these patterns, which may be expected...

Limitations of time resources in human relationships determine social structures

“…There is a trade-off between the number of social relationships (that is, N) and the mean strength of social relationships (that is, m) ( ( Hill and Dunbar, 2003;Roberts and Dunbar, 2011;Saramaki et al, 2014). Here, we found a simple law where N was inversely proportional to m a (a41).…”

“…Thus, we expect that they employ strategies to distribute the limited time resources to maximize benefits from their social relationships (Brown and Brown, 2006;Miritello et al, 2013b;Saramaki et al, 2014). As a result of such strategies, social relationship strengths (as measured by frequency of social grooming (Roberts and Dunbar, 2011;Arnaboldi et al, 2012;Song et al, 2012;Arnaboldi et al, 2013b;Fujihara and Miwa, 2014;Saramaki et al, 2014) may often show a much skewed distribution (Zhou et al, 2005;Arnaboldi et al, 2013b) (distributions following a power law (Hossmann et al, 2011;Arnaboldi et al, 2012;Hu et al, 2012;Song et al, 2012;Fujihara and Miwa, 2014)). …”

“…They are useful for constructing theoretical models of social phenomena. Studies (Arnaboldi et al, 2012;Song et al, 2012;Fujihara and Miwa, 2014;Hossmann et al, 2011;Arnaboldi et al, 2013b;Hu et al, 2012;Takano et al, 2016a;Saramaki et al, 2014;Dunbar, 2016;Takano et al, 2016b) previously cited in this paper have also analysed data from SNSs, mobile phones, social network games, and SMSs.…”

Temporal pattern of online communication spike trains in spreading a scientific rumor: how often, who interacts with whom?

“…These numbers are smaller for @, e.g., 102,802 who and 31,477 whom, and even smaller for RE, with 27,227 who and 18,578 whom. In each case, whom is much lower than who, as expected because a small number of users tend to attract a large fraction of attention in both friendship [46,47] and online social [48][49][50][51][52] networks. This observation is confirmed in Figure 2, where we present Zipf plots associated to each interaction, clearly showing a strong heterogeneity in the system.…”

Sizes of Permanent Campsite Communities Reflect Constraints on Natural Human Communities

“…It would be particularly illuminating to observe the conditional frequencies with which individuals joined and left communities so as to test the hypothesis that joining rates are higher on the downside of each number and leaving rates higher on the upside. The hierarchically inclusive layered structuring of both natural communities and personal social networks is a consequence of a combination of cognitive limits on the number of relationships that can be maintained at a given emotional intensity and the time available to maintain such relationships (Miritello et al 2013;Dunbar 2011a, 2011b;Saramäki et al 2014;Sutcliffe et al 2012;Roberts et al 2014), with very characteristic frequencies of interaction for each layer that are, in fact, mirrored even in the online world (Arnabaldi et al 2015;Dunbar et al 2015). We might expect the camp communities to be organized in the same way.…”