ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Cognitive resource allocation determines the organization of personal networks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- The physics of sociality: Investigating patterns of social resource distribution among theiScience · 2025Article
- Social coordination perpetuates stereotypic expectations and behaviors across generations in deep multiagent reinforcement learning.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Reflecting on Dunbar's numbers: Individual differences in energy allocation to personal relationships.PloS one · 2025Article
- Causal evidence for social group sizes from Wikipedia editing data.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- The rhythms of transient relationships: allocating time between weekdays and weekends.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Universal patterns in egocentric communication networks.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Chimpanzees organize their social relationships like humans.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era.Nature human behaviour · 2022Review
- Structural measures of personal networks predict migrants' cultural backgrounds: an explanation from Grid/Group theory.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Beyond Dunbar circles: a continuous description of social relationships and resource allocation.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- The scaling of social interactions across animal species.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Perception-driven dynamics of mimicry based on attractor field model.Interface focus · 2021Article
- Evolution of social relationships between first-year students at middle school: from cliques to circles.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- The Neurobiology of Social Distance.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2020Review
- Structure and function in human and primate social networks: implications for diffusion, network stability and health.Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2020Review
- Impact of individual actions on the collective response of social systems.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The fractal structure of communities of practice: Implications for business organization.PloS one · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
The typical human personal social network contains about 150 relationships including kin, friends, and acquaintances, organized into a set of hierarchically inclusive layers of increasing size but decreasing emotional intensity. Data from a number of different sources reveal that these inclusive layers exhibit a constant scaling ratio of [Formula: see text] While the overall size of the networks has been connected to our cognitive capacity, no mechanism explaining why the networks present a layered structure with a consistent scaling has been proposed. Here we show that the existence of a heterogeneous cost to relationships (in terms of time or cognitive investment), together with a limitation in the total capacity an individual has to invest in them, can naturally explain the existence of layers and, when the cost function is linear, explain the scaling between them. We develop a one-parameter Bayesian model that fits the empirical data remarkably well. In addition, the model predicts the existence of a contrasting regime in the case of small communities, such that the layers have an inverted structure (increasing size with increasing emotional intensity). We test the model with five communities and provide clear evidence of the existence of the two predicted regimes. Our model explains, based on first principles, the emergence of structure in the organization of personal networks and allows us to predict a rare phenomenon whose existence we confirm empirically.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.