Bridge ties bind collective memories

Ida Momennejad,Alin Coman,Ajua Duker

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-09452-y

Ida Momennejad, Alin Coman + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09452-y

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Abstract

From families to nations, what binds individuals in social groups is, to a large degree, their shared beliefs, norms, and memories. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur because communication among individuals results in community-wide synchronization. Here, we use experimental manipulations in lab-created networks to investigate how the temporal dynamics of conversations shape the formation of collective memories. We show that when individuals that bridge between clusters (i.e., bridge ties) communicate early on in a series of networked interactions, the network reaches higher mnemonic convergence compared to when individuals first interact within clusters (i.e., cluster ties). This effect, we show, is due to the tradeoffs between initial information diversity and accumulated overlap over time. Our approach provides a framework to analyze and design interventions in social networks that optimize information sharing and diminish the likelihood of information bubbles and polarization.

Highlights

From families to nations, what binds individuals in social groups is, to a large degree, their shared beliefs, norms, and memories
Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that the mnemonic convergence increased from pre- to post-conversation to a larger degree in the Bridge Ties First condition than in the Cluster Ties First condition (Fig. 3a)
Bridge Ties First communities reached more convergent collective memories than Cluster Ties First communities. This pattern, we argued, is due to the fact that bridge ties lead to the increased mnemonic similarity among individuals who belong to connected clusters over time

Summary

Introduction

What binds individuals in social groups is, to a large degree, their shared beliefs, norms, and memories. We show experimentally that the temporal sequence of conversations in social networks impacts the degree to which communities converge on a shared memory of the past This investigation has the potential to illuminate phenomena that are directly dependent on a network’s collective memories, such as the mobilization of collective identity[6,7] and collective behavior[8,9], and to highlight how the interplay between micro-level cognitive processes and the structural and temporal features of social networks can give rise to large-scale social phenomena[1,12]. This research has shown, for instance, that networks characterized by clusters that are highly connected with one another form more convergent collective memories than networks comprised of sparsely connected clusters This is because connections between clusters allow for information to propagate through the network, which synchronizes the community members’ memories[10]. Not all individual members are, influential in their potential to affect the collective memory of the larger network

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