Persistence of social signatures in human communication

CABDyN members recently published a study of small group of individuals tracked over 18 months. They combined survey data and details from mobile phone call records to study the communication patterns and social ties of the individuals over this period. The call records provided a complete list of time-stamped calls made by the study participants to everyone in their networks, whereas the surveys provided specific information about the people in a network, including emotional closeness, time between face-to-face contact, and all phone numbers attached to individual network members. They found that the pattern of how individuals distribute time and attention across their network of social relationships, something that they called ‘social signature’, is broadly similar with most effort invested in a small number of strong relationships. Although the social signature varies between individuals, it appears to persist for a given individual, presumably as a consequence of constraints on time, emotional capital, and cognition. In what is widely perceived as an era of ‘big data’, it is worth thinking about the value of smaller-scale but highly detailed studies like this one. One motivation for their work is to develop an understanding of patterns of behaviour based on in-depth and small-scale studies, which can help them decode patterns that that we see in large-scale studies where we typically know very little about individual’s attributes or the reasons for their actions

27 January 2014

Jari Sarama¨ki, E. A. Leicht, Eduardo Lo´pez, Sam G. B. Roberts, Felix Reed-Tsochas, and Robin I. M. Dunbar (2014). Persistence of social signatures in human communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(3): 942-947