Personality traits and ego-network dynamics

Abstract

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 high-intensity relationships while maintaining larger numbers of less close relationships. It has also been shown that there are persistent individual differences in this pattern; some individuals allocate their efforts more uniformly across their networks, while others strongly focus on their closest relationships. Furthermore, some individuals maintain more stable networks than others. Here, we focus on how personality traits of individuals affect this picture, using mobile phone calls records and survey data from the Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) study. In particular, we look at the relationship between personality traits and the (i) persistence of social signatures, namely the similarity of the social signature shape of an individual measured in different time intervals; (ii) the turnover in egocentric networks, that is, differences in the set of alters present at two consecutive temporal intervals; and (iii) the rank dynamics defined as the variation of alter rankings in egocentric networks in consecutive intervals. We observe that some traits have effects on the stability of the social signatures as well as network turnover and rank dynamics. As an example, individuals who score highly in the Openness to Experience trait tend to have higher levels of network turnover and larger alter rank variations. On broader terms, our study shows that personality traits clearly affect the ways in which individuals maintain their personal networks.

Social physics: uncovering human behaviour from communication

“…Also, that this pattern is usually the characteristic of an individual and could be considered as a "social signature" of that person. In a recent study, Centellegher et al (2017) have explored the connections between the social signatures obtained from mobile phone calling and the individual personality traits of the participants obtained using Big five model surveys 6 . They observed the extroverts to have slightly lower temporal persistence of their social signatures, as compared to the introverts.…”

Understanding the interplay between social and spatial behaviour

“…While this is a shared strategy, there is clear evidence for individual-level variation. First, social circles vary in terms of diversity: they differ in size [7] -within a maximum upper-bound of ∼ 150 individuals [6] -and in structure [4,29]. Second, individuals display different attitudes towards exploration of social opportunities as they are more or less keen on creating new connections [30][31][32][33].…”

Social fluidity mobilizes contagion in human and animal populations

“…Another hurdle in previous work has been the assumption that observed interactions will persist into the future [48]. Our method assumes only that the distribution of relationships remains constant through time, an assumption that is consistent with growing evidence [19,49].…”

“…Another hurdle in previous work has been the assumption that observed interactions will persist into the future [48]. Our method assumes only that the distribution of relationships remains constant through time, an assumption that is consistent with growing evidence [19,49].In trying to elucidate the connection between social behaviors and the spread of disease the first question to ask is whether the type of interactive behavior that the species participates in enables transmission of the infection. If it does, then the next important variable is the frequency of these interactions.…”