Understanding collective regularity in human mobility as a familiar stranger phenomenon

Yan Leng,Alex Pentland,Dominiquo Santistevan

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-98475-x

Yan Leng, Alex Pentland + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-98475-x

Copy DOI

Abstract

Beyond the physical structures that contain daily routines, urban city dwellers repeatedly encounter strangers that similarly shape their environments. Familiar strangers are neither formal acquaintances nor completely anonymous faces in daily urban life. Due to data limitations, there is a lack of research focused on uncovering the structure of the “Familiar Stranger” phenomenon at a large scale while simultaneously investigating the social relationships between such strangers. Using countrywide mobile phone records from Andorra, we empirically show the existence of such a phenomenon as well as details concerning these strangers’ relative social relations. To understand the social and spatial components of familiar strangers more deeply, we study the temporal regularity and spatial structure of collective urban mobility to shed light on the mechanisms that guide these interactions. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between social distances and the number of encounters to show that more significant physical encounters correspond to a shorter social distance. Understanding these social and physical networks has essential implications for epidemics spreading, urban planning, and information diffusion.

Highlights

Beyond the physical structures that contain daily routines, urban city dwellers repeatedly encounter strangers that shape their environments
We mainly focus on the temporal rhythms and spatial structure of two consecutive encounters of familiar stranger pairs to uncover the mechanisms that underlie the encounters as well as the latent social relationships undergirding the encounters between individuals
To explore the routine mobile action that results in physical encounters at a national scale, we create an encounter network based on mobility behavior across an entire month and measure the interevent time t between consecutive encounters for each user pair, focusing on those pairs without a previous history of direct social contact, or what we refer to as familiar strangers

Summary

Introduction

Beyond the physical structures that contain daily routines, urban city dwellers repeatedly encounter strangers that shape their environments. To capture the physical encounter network at a countrywide scale and establish that the encounters are not between actual “friends,” i.e. non-strangers, we use countrywide mobile phone data in Andorra.

Results

Conclusion