Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups

PLoS One

Nicholas A. Christakis¹  Marta C. González²  Samuel Arbesman³  Jukka-Pekka Onnela³  Albert-László Barabási⁴ 

[1] Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America;Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America;Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America;Department of Physics, Biology and Computer Science, Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

关键词: Centrality;    Mathematical models;    Behavioral geography;    Cell phones;    Historical geography;    Social networks;    Europe;    Telecommunications;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.pone.0016939

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

Social groups are fundamental building blocks of human societies. While our social interactions have always been constrained by geography, it has been impossible, due to practical difficulties, to evaluate the nature of this restriction on social group structure. We construct a social network of individuals whose most frequent geographical locations are also known. We also classify the individuals into groups according to a community detection algorithm. We study the variation of geographical span for social groups of varying sizes, and explore the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of their members. We find that small social groups are geographically very tight, but become much more clumped when the group size exceeds about 30 members. Also, we find no correlation between the topological positions and geographic positions of individuals within network communities. These results suggest that spreading processes face distinct structural and spatial constraints.

【 授权许可】

CC BY