Abstract
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 consequent loss of the benefits that derive from individual relationships. As a result, many social species compensate for weakened relationships by investing more heavily in them. Here we study how humans behave in similar situations, using data from mobile call detail records from a European country. For the less frequent contacts between pairs of communicating individuals we observe a logarithmic dependence of the duration of the succeeding call on the time gap with the previous call. We find that such behaviour is likely when the individuals in these dyadic pairs have the same gender and are in the same age bracket as well as being geographically distant. Our results indicate that these pairs deliberately invest more time in communication so as to reinforce their social bonding and prevent their relationships decaying when these are threatened by lack of interaction.
Highlights
For intensely social species like primates, close friendships buffer the individual against the stresses of living in enforced proximity to others, and so make living in social groups possible [, ]
For a given ego we study the data on mobile phone communication with the alters with whom the communication events are sufficiently spaced in time yet showing a degree of regularity
3 Discussion Our main focus in the study has been with whether individuals adjust the time investment they make in relationships that matter to them when these are at risk
Summary
For intensely social species like primates, close friendships buffer the individual against the stresses of living in enforced proximity to others, and so make living in social groups possible [ , ]. In both primates [ – ] and humans [ – ], the number and quality of a female’s social relationships has a direct effect on the stress she suffers, the illness she and her offspring experience, the number of offspring she has and even her survival (see [ ]). For example, are obliged by the foraging demands of lactation to reduce time invested in grooming their main social partners; they later exhibit a rebound
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