Emergence of communities and diversity in social networks

Date
2017-03-14
Authors
Han, Xiao
Cao, Shinan
Shen, Zhesi
Zhang, Boyu
Wang, Wen-Xu
Cressman, Ross
Stanley, H. Eugene
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Xiao Han, Shinan Cao, Zhesi Shen, Boyu Zhang, Wen-Xu Wang, Ross Cressman, H Eugene Stanley. 2017. "Emergence of communities and diversity in social networks." Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America, Volume 114, Issue 11, pp. 2887 - 2891. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1608164114
Abstract
Communities are common in complex networks and play a significant role in the functioning of social, biological, economic, and technological systems. Despite widespread interest in detecting community structures in complex networks and exploring the effect of communities on collective dynamics, a deep understanding of the emergence and prevalence of communities in social networks is still lacking. Addressing this fundamental problem is of paramount importance in understanding, predicting, and controlling a variety of collective behaviors in society. An elusive question is how communities with common internal properties arise in social networks with great individual diversity. Here, we answer this question using the ultimatum game, which has been a paradigm for characterizing altruism and fairness. We experimentally show that stable local communities with different internal agreements emerge spontaneously and induce social diversity into networks, which is in sharp contrast to populations with random interactions. Diverse communities and social norms come from the interaction between responders with inherent heterogeneous demands and rational proposers via local connections, where the former eventually become the community leaders. This result indicates that networks are significant in the emergence and stabilization of communities and social diversity. Our experimental results also provide valuable information about strategies for developing network models and theories of evolutionary games and social dynamics.
Description
License
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.