Multichannel social signatures and persistent features of ego networks

Sara Heydari,Jari Saramäki,Sam G Roberts,Robin I M Dunbar

doi:10.1007/s41109-018-0065-4

Abstract

The structure of egocentric networks reflects the way people balance their need for strong, emotionally intense relationships and a diversity of weaker ties. Egocentric network structure can be quantified with ’social signatures’, which describe how people distribute their communication effort across the members (alters) of their personal networks. Social signatures based on call data have indicated that people mostly communicate with a few close alters; they also have persistent, distinct signatures. To examine if these results hold for other channels of communication, here we compare social signatures built from call and text message data, and develop a way of constructing mixed social signatures using both channels. We observe that all types of signatures display persistent individual differences that remain stable despite the turnover in individual alters. We also show that call, text, and mixed signatures resemble one another both at the population level and at the level of individuals. The consistency of social signatures across individuals for different channels of communication is surprising because the choice of channel appears to be alter-specific with no clear overall pattern, and ego networks constructed from calls and texts overlap only partially in terms of alters. These results demonstrate individuals vary in how they allocate their communication effort across their personal networks and this variation is persistent over time and across different channels of communication.

Highlights

Social relationships that are strong and supportive are fundamentally important for health and well-being, in both humans and other primates (House et al 1988; Lyubomirsky et al 2005; Wittig et al.; Holt-Lunstad et al 2010; Manninen et al 2017)
We compute the social signatures for each egocentric network and each interval by ranking alters according to their weight and calculating the fraction of weight at each rank
Individuals vary in how they allocate their time across their ego networks and this variation is persistent over time, despite a turnover of individuals alters in the network

Summary

Introduction

Social relationships that are strong and supportive are fundamentally important for health and well-being, in both humans and other primates (House et al 1988; Lyubomirsky et al 2005; Wittig et al.; Holt-Lunstad et al 2010; Manninen et al 2017). At the same time, maintaining social ties comes at a cost: time and cognitive resources are finite (Miritello et al 2013; Miritello et al 2013). This cost is high for close relationships (Roberts et al 2009). Personal networks typically have only a few close ties and many weak ties. This is visible both at the level of entire social networks (Onnela et al 2007) as well as in how people structure their personal networks (Saramäki et al 2014)

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