Discrete Hierarchical Organization of Social Group Sizes
arXiv:cond-mat/0403299 · doi:10.1098/rspb.2004.2970
Abstract
The ``social brain hypothesis'' for the evolution of large brains in primates has led to evidence for the coevolution of neocortical size and social group sizes. Extrapolation of these findings to modern humans indicated that the equivalent group size for our species should be approximately 150 (essentially the number of people known personally as individuals). Here, we combine data on human grouping in a comprehensive and systematic study. Using fractal analysis, we identify with high statistical confidence a discrete hierarchy of group sizes with a preferred scaling ratio close to 3: rather than a single or a continuous spectrum of group sizes, humans spontaneously form groups of preferred sizes organized in a geometrical series approximating 3, 9, 27,... Such discrete scale invariance (DSI) could be related to that identified in signatures of herding behavior in financial markets and might reflect a hierarchical processing of social nearness by human brains.
14 Latex pages including 5 figures
References in corpus (4)
Cited by in corpus (58)
- The persistence of social signatures in human communication
- Socially-Aware Networking: A Survey
- The Internet of People (IoP): A New Wave in Pervasive Mobile Computing
- Sex differences in intimate relationships
- A case study of speculative financial bubbles in the South African stock market 2003-2006
- Ego Network Structure in Online Social Networks and its Impact on Information Diffusion
- Clarifications to Questions and Criticisms on the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette Bubble Model
- Antibubble and Prediction of China's stock market and Real-Estate
- Effects of Deception in Social Networks
- The Internet of People: A human and data-centric paradigm for the Next Generation Internet
- The Structure of Online Social Networks Mirror Those in the Offline World
- About the Power to Enforce and Prevent Consensus by Manipulating Communication Rules
- Understanding the interplay between social and spatial behaviour
- How Much is the Whole Really More than the Sum of its Parts? 1 + 1 = 2.5: Superlinear Productivity in Collective Group Actions
- Harnessing the Power of Ego Network Layers for Link Prediction in Online Social Networks
- Beyond Dunbar circles: a continuous description of social relationships and resource allocation
- Statistical significance of rich-club phenomena in complex networks
- Financial Bubbles, Real Estate bubbles, Derivative Bubbles, and the Financial and Economic Crisis
- Narrative structure of A Song of Ice and Fire creates a fictional world with realistic measures of social complexity
- The academic wanderer: structure of collaboration network and relation with research performance
- Coloring in the Links: Capturing Social Ties as They are Perceived
- Critical size of ego communication networks
- Reentrant phase transitions in threshold driven contagion on multiplex networks
- A generic model of dyadic social relationships
- Evolution of Ego-networks in Social Media with Link Recommendations
- Contour lines of the discrete scale invariant rough surfaces
- Twitter and the Press: an Ego-Centred Analysis
- Structure of Ego-alter relationships of Politicians in Twitter
- A Social Cognitive Heuristic for Adaptive Data Dissemination in Mobile Opportunistic Networks
- Growing networks of overlapping communities with internal structure
- Link-centric analysis of variation by demographics in mobile phone communication patterns
- Different patterns of social closeness observed in mobile phone communication
- Diffusion of innovations in finite networks: effects of heterogeneity, clustering, and bilingual option on the threshold in the contagion game model
- On-device modeling of user's social context and familiar places from smartphone-embedded sensor data
- Endogenous versus Exogenous Origins of Crises
- A Theory of Discrete Hierarchies as Optimal Cost-Adjusted Productivity Organisations
- The Stability of Transient Relationships
- Transmission of cultural traits in layered ego-centric networks
- Competing local and global interactions in social dynamics: how important is the friendship network?
- Is radicalization reinforced by social media censorship?
- Social Network Generation and Role Determination Based on Smartphone Data
- Discrete hierarchy of sizes and performances in the exchange-traded fund universe
- Evolution of Human-like Social Grooming Strategies regarding Richness and Group Size
- Diagnosis and Prediction of Tipping Points in Financial Markets: Crashes and Rebounds
- Role of Intensive and Extensive Variables in a Soup of Firms in Economy to Address Long Run Prices and Aggregate Data
- Limitations of Time Resources in Human Relationships Determine Social Structures
- Structural invariants and semantic fingerprints in the "ego network" of words
- Journalists' ego networks in Twitter: invariant and distinctive structural features
- Structural invariants in individuals language use: the "ego network" of words
- Effectiveness of Alter Sampling in Social Networks
- The Rhythms of Transient Relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends
- A null model for Dunbar's circles
- On the scaling of functional spaces, from smart cities to cloud computing
- Comparative analysis of layered structures in empirical investor networks and cellphone communication networks
- Multiple dynamical time-scales in networks with hierarchically nested modular organization
- Absence makes the heart grow fonder: social compensation when failure to interact risks weakening a relationship
- Two Types of Social Grooming Methods depending on the Trade-off between the Number and Strength of Social Relationships
- Inferring Fundamental Value and Crash Nonlinearity from Bubble Calibration