You Can Pick Your (Best) Friends
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - 11:00am - 11:45am
Keller 3-180
David Liben-Nowell (Carleton College)
Recent research has revealed many remarkably robust structural
properties of social networks: triadic closure, heavy-tailed degree
distributions, and small-world phenomena, to name just a few. Of
course, the why of these properties has generally been more
elusive. In this talk, I will present some results from a recent
collaboration with evolutionary psychologists and computer scientists
on questions of how people choose friends and prioritize among those
friends. Specifically, I will describe analysis of large sample of
MySpace profiles containing Top Friends lists, in which an
individual selects a small subset of his or her friends and organizes
them into a ranked order of that individual's choice. Different
classes of behavioral hypotheses give rise to very different
graph-theoretic structures in the best-friend network, and we can use
these ranking data to provide supporting evidence for some of these
theories.
Joint work with Peter DeScioli, Robert Kurzban, and Elizabeth Koch.
properties of social networks: triadic closure, heavy-tailed degree
distributions, and small-world phenomena, to name just a few. Of
course, the why of these properties has generally been more
elusive. In this talk, I will present some results from a recent
collaboration with evolutionary psychologists and computer scientists
on questions of how people choose friends and prioritize among those
friends. Specifically, I will describe analysis of large sample of
MySpace profiles containing Top Friends lists, in which an
individual selects a small subset of his or her friends and organizes
them into a ranked order of that individual's choice. Different
classes of behavioral hypotheses give rise to very different
graph-theoretic structures in the best-friend network, and we can use
these ranking data to provide supporting evidence for some of these
theories.
Joint work with Peter DeScioli, Robert Kurzban, and Elizabeth Koch.