The two-way mirror: The reflection of subjective status in networks 

Project members: Victoria L. Money, Nicolas L. Harder, Gage Pierce 

We utilize newly acquired data that aligns with the General Social Survey (GSS) to investigate the connection between subjective status and social networks, including their structure and composition. Our findings indicate that individuals who perceive themselves to be doing better than others in their community tend to have larger networks and are more likely to be members of more volunteer organizations. These findings relate to studies examining how subjective status, akin to the social ranking among non-human primates (e.g., baboons), affects behavior and longevity. In this context, we draw connections between subjective status and group membership dynamics, including networks and organizational affiliations, to better comprehend how status influences the development of relationships and facilitates access to various forms of social capital. 

Developing a better model for simulation of Social Ecological Phenomena 

Project members: Nicolas Harder, Matthew Brashears, Gage Pierce 

Although methods exist to study competition between social entities within an ecology, these methods fall short of sufficient resolution to understand the behavior of entities at specific combinations of characteristics where population density is high (such as recruitment into organizations on a college campus) or to make predictions of future states of an ecology. The Hybrid Blau Space (HBS) model addresses these prior shortcomings by combining ecological modeling with an agent-based modeling approach. The model utilizes a discrete cellular framework and probabilistic urn models to simulate both influence and competition between social entities while suffering from fewer limitations then prior approaches. In addition to this basic framework, the model also currently includes: mechanisms for weighting, the ability to handle binary and ordinal variables, a series of descriptive metrics, and measures for model fit. This model is currently available in its beta via request, with a public R package coming soon! 

Wilde’s Dilemma: The Role of Deception in Social Networks 

Project members: Matthew E. Brashears, Victoria L. Money, Gage Pierce 

Considerable effort has been expended on measuring, quantifying and analyzing social networks, often with a focus on the role of these networks in transmitting information between individuals. However, two converging lines of research rooted in evolutionary biology as well as ego-network research suggest that social networks are likely characterized as much, if not more, by the non-transmission of information. This implies that secret keeping and lying should be common rather than rare in core human groups. We combine these lines of research, arguing that “Wilde’s Dilemma,” the paradox that those whom it is riskiest to deceive are also those it is most beneficial to lie to or keep secrets from, is a defining force in human social network behavior. We begin to evaluate this claim by analyzing a pair of survey experiments that expose respondents at random to one of three ego-network name generators: the conventional “important matters” name generator, a name generator asking from whom secrets are kept, and a name generator asking to whom lies are told. Additional measures of interaction frequency, resource availability, and network density are also gathered. We anticipate that the compositions of the networks yielded by all three name generators will be essentially identical but that the network structures of secret networks and lying networks will differ from each other.  

Persistent Counter-Category Information Task 

Project members: Joseph Quinn, Victoria Money 

Research in social science emphasizes the stability of meanings about social identity categories, but these theories also imply a set of conditions that, while non-trivial, are conducive to changes in category meaning. We are reviewing and linking disparate literatures in social psychology, social cognition, cultural sociology, and socialization to construct theoretically-informed hypotheses about the construction or revision of category meanings, and testing these hypotheses through a novel task in which we (a) lead actors to internalize information about members of particular category groups and (b) measure the impact of this internalization on voluntary tie formation and team performance in a series of downstream tasks. 

Tension, Constraint, and Action: How Affect Control Shapes Interpersonal Relations  

Project members: Laura Aufderheide Brashears, Matthew E. Brashears  

Humans like their world to be affectively sensible and to consist of dense, embedded groups. But what happens when these twin drives come into conflict? We use Affect Control Theory to argue that the preference for affectively consistent network structures central to Balance Theory can be explained in part as a response to accumulated deflection manifesting as tension in relationships. Moreover, in addition to reducing or eliminating deflection through restorative action and cognitive reinterpretation, we argue that individuals may reimagine their most constraining networks as belonging to a domain (i.e., kin) in which persistent deflection is easier to understand. We evaluate our predictions using a novel longitudinal dataset of members of communes from the 1970s that captures data on interpersonal relationships, fictive kinship status, relationship tension, and group constraint. We find, as expected, that relationship imbalance is experienced as involving less tension when individuals transform the ties from non-kin to fictive kin, thereby making the persistent deflection cognitively sensible. Our work makes important contributions to linking Balance Theory’s mesolevel predictions to the microlevel machinery of Affect Control Theory and opens new terrain for understanding responses to deflection.