More Like this

1. Friends Are Resources Too: Examining College-Going Aspirations in Stable and Newly Established Friendships among Urban and Rural Low-Income Students

   Chen, I; Young, L; Schneider, B. (January 2018, American Educational Research Association)

   Drawing from social capital theory, this study examines the extent to which stable versus new friendship patterns affect low income students’ educational aspirations in urban and rural high schools. Using whole school sociometric data (744 high school students over a two-year period), this study applies a social influence model to determine the effects of stable and newly established friendships on conformity regarding college-going aspirations. Findings indicate that urban students have more new friends and their educational aspirations increased, conforming to those of their newly established friends. In contrast, rural students have more stable friendships than the urban students and their educational aspirations conformed to those of their stable friends. This work shows that rural students tend not to change their school network size or nominations. However, urban students are more willing to include new students in their school networks which have a positive effect on raising their educational aspirations. 

   more » « less
2. Diffusion in Social Networks: Effects of Monophilic Contagion, Friendship Paradox and Reactive Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSE.2019.2909015  

   Nettasinghe, Buddhika; Krishnamurthy, Vikram; Lerman, Kristina (April 2019, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering)

   We consider SIS contagion processes over networks where, a classical assumption is that individuals' decisions to adopt a contagion are based on their immediate neighbors. However, recent literature shows that some attributes are more correlated between two-hop neighbors, a concept referred to as monophily. This motivates us to explore monophilic contagion, the case where a contagion (e.g. a product, disease) is adopted by considering two-hop neighbors instead of immediate neighbors (e.g. you ask your friend about the new iPhone and she recommends you the opinion of one of her friends). We show that the phenomenon called friendship paradox makes it easier for the monophilic contagion to spread widely. We also consider the case where the underlying network stochastically evolves in response to the state of the contagion (e.g. depending on the severity of a flu virus, people restrict their interactions with others to avoid getting infected) and show that the dynamics of such a process can be approximated by a differential equation whose trajectory satisfies an algebraic constraint restricting it to a manifold. Our results shed light on how graph theoretic consequences affect contagions and, provide simple deterministic models to approximate the collective dynamics of contagions over stochastic graph processes. 

   more » « less
3. Abstract cognitive maps of social network structure aid adaptive inference

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2310801120  

   Son, Jae-Young; Bhandari, Apoorva; FeldmanHall, Oriel (November 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Social navigation—such as anticipating where gossip may spread, or identifying which acquaintances can help land a job—relies on knowing how people are connected within their larger social communities. Problematically, for most social networks, the space of possible relationships is too vast to observe and memorize. Indeed, people's knowledge of these social relations is well known to be biased and error-prone. Here, we reveal that these biased representations reflect a fundamental computation that abstracts over individual relationships to enable principled inferences about unseen relationships. We propose a theory of network representation that explains how people learn inferential cognitive maps of social relations from direct observation, what kinds of knowledge structures emerge as a consequence, and why it can be beneficial to encode systematic biases into social cognitive maps. Leveraging simulations, laboratory experiments, and “field data” from a real-world network, we find that people abstract observations of direct relations (e.g., friends) into inferences of multistep relations (e.g., friends-of-friends). This multistep abstraction mechanism enables people to discover and represent complex social network structure, affording adaptive inferences across a variety of contexts, including friendship, trust, and advice-giving. Moreover, this multistep abstraction mechanism unifies a variety of otherwise puzzling empirical observations about social behavior. Our proposal generalizes the theory of cognitive maps to the fundamental computational problem of social inference, presenting a powerful framework for understanding the workings of a predictive mind operating within a complex social world. 

   more » « less
4. Emergent complex quantum networks in continuous-variables non-Gaussian states

   https://doi.org/10.1088/2058-9565/accdfd  

   Walschaers, Mattia; Sundar, Bhuvanesh; Treps, Nicolas; Carr, Lincoln D; Parigi, Valentina (May 2023, Quantum Science and Technology)

   Abstract We use complex network theory to study a class of photonic continuous variable quantum states that present both multipartite entanglement and non-Gaussian statistics. We consider the intermediate scale of several dozens of modes at which such systems are already hard to characterize. In particular, the states are built from an initial imprinted cluster state created via Gaussian entangling operations according to a complex network structure. We then engender non-Gaussian statistics via multiple photon subtraction operations acting on a single node. We replicate in the quantum regime some of the models that mimic real-world complex networks in order to test their structural properties under local operations. We go beyond the already known single-mode effects, by studying the emergent network of photon-number correlations via complex networks measures. We analytically prove that the imprinted network structure defines a vicinity of nodes, at a distance of four steps from the photon-subtracted node, in which the emergent network changes due to photon subtraction. We show numerically that the emergent structure is greatly influenced by the structure of the imprinted network. Indeed, while the mean and the variance of the degree and clustering distribution of the emergent network always increase, the higher moments of the distributions are governed by the specific structure of the imprinted network. Finally, we show that the behaviour of nearest neighbours of the subtraction node depends on how they are connected to each other in the imprinted structure. 

   more » « less
5. Theory of mind as a mechanism linking mother–toddler relationship quality and child–friend interaction during the preschool years

   https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12377  

   McElwain, Nancy L.; Ravindran, Niyantri; Emery, Helen T.; Swartz, Rebecca (May 2019, Social Development)

   Abstract Children's relationships with parents and peers have been examined as predictors and outcomes, respectively, of theory of mind (ToM). Yet, these two lines of inquiry have remained largely distinct. The current study bridges this gap. Mother–child coordinated interaction and attachment security (continuous rating) were assessed at 2.8 years (N = 128 dyads), ToM was assessed at 3.3, 4.8, and 5.4 years, and child–friend interaction was observed at 4.8 and 5.4 years. Controlling for child expressive language ability at 2.8 years, mother–child coordinated interaction predicted more complex child–friend play and less child–friend conflict via more advanced ToM. No indirect effects from attachment security to friendship quality via ToM emerged. Attachment group status (secure vs. insecure), however, moderated ToM‐friendship associations, such that (a) more advanced ToM predicted more socially complex play with friends, and (b) more conflict with friends predicted more advanced ToM, but only for children classified as secure. 

   more » « less