Relating a Reified Adaptive Network’s Structure to Its Emerging Behaviour for Bonding by Homophily

Abstract

In this chapter it is analysed how emerging behaviour in an adaptive social network for bonding can be related to characteristics of the adaptive network’s structure, which includes the structure of the adaptation principles incorporated. In particular, this is addressed for adaptive social networks for bonding based on homophily and for community formation in such adaptive social networks. To this end, relevant characteristics of the reified network structure (including the adaptation principle) have been identified, such as a tipping point for similarity as used for homophily. Applying network reification, the adaptive network characteristics are represented by reification states in the extended network, and adaptation principles are described by characteristics of these reification states, in particular their connectivity characteristics (their connections) and their aggregation characteristics (in terms of their combination functions). According to this network reification approach, as one of the results it has been found how the emergence of communities strongly depends on the value of this similarity tipping point. Moreover, it is shown that some characteristics entail that the connection weights all converge to 0 (for persons in different communities) or 1 (for persons within one community).