Segregation in religion networks

Abstract

Religious beliefs could facilitate human cooperation [1][2][3][4][5][6], promote civic engagement [7][8][9][10], improve life satisfaction [11][12][13] and even boom economic development [14][15][16]. On the other side, some aspects of religion may lead to regional violence, intergroup conflict and moral prejudice against atheists [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Analogous to the separation of races [24], the religious segregation is a major ingredient resulting in increasing alienation, misunderstanding, cultural conflict and even violence among believers of different faiths [18,19,25].Thus far, quantitative understanding of religious segregation is rare. Here we analyze a directed social network extracted from weibo.com (the largest directed social network in China, similar to twitter.com), which is consisted of 6875 believers in Christianism, Buddhism, Islam and Taoism. This religion network is highly segregative, with only 1.6% of links connecting individuals in different religions. Comparative analysis shows that the extent of segregation for different religions is much higher than that for different races and slightly higher than that for different political parties. The few cross-religion links play a critical role in maintaining network connectivity, being remarkably more important than links with highest betweennesses [26] or bridgenesses [27]. Further content analysis shows that 46.7% of these cross-religion links are probably related to charitable issues. Our findings provide quantitative insights into religious segregation and valuable clues to encourage cross-religion communications.Religion is considered as a notable origin of interpersonal relations, as well as an effective and efficient tool to organize a huge number of people towards some challenging targets. At the same time, a believer prefers to make friend with other people of the same faith, and thus people of different faiths tend to

Dynamic characteristics of students’ communicative behavior in social networks

“…In particular, the specified issue is relevant for the communities treated by most of the population as "others". It is interesting that the comparative analysis shows that the extent of segregation for different religions is much higher than that for different races and slightly higher than that for different political parties (Hu, Zhang & Zhou, 2019).…”

Representative methods of computational socioeconomics

“…A typical research example is how to quantify the religious segregation via analyzing social media data [9]. Religion locates in the core of culture, exhibiting significant positive values like to facilitate human cooperation [10] and to improve life satification [11].…”

“…Questionnaire is not suitable in this scenario because some questions could cause offence. Instead, Hu et al [9] collected publicly available data from weibo.com (one of the largest online social platforms in China, similar to Twitter), where users with religious beliefs are identified by NLP techniques (see details in [9]) and a subgraph induced by these believers is analyzed. Four major conclusions are drawn from such natural data.…”

Community Structure and Its Stability on a Face-to-Face Interaction Network in Kyoto City

“…In previous studies, social networks through SNS and cell phones have been extensively investigated, while large-scale face-to-face interaction networks have not been constructed. Large-scale social networks via cell phones and SNS have revealed that people's social connections are related to their economic status [2][3][4][5] and social fragmentation among people with different attributes [6,7]. Universal structural features of social networks have also been investigated such as SNS, e-mail, paper November 23, 2021 1/28 co-authorship networks, and web-based collaboration networks and their scale-free nature is known [8,9].…”