ArticleScientific reports2022
Beyond Dunbar circles: a continuous description of social relationships and resource allocation.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Theorizing "cultural signatures" in worldwide personal networks.Open research Europe · 2026Article
- 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
- Article
- Causal evidence for social group sizes from Wikipedia editing data.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Genomic profiling and spatial SEIR modeling of COVID-19 transmission in Western New York.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- The rhythms of transient relationships: allocating time between weekdays and weekends.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Social bonds are related to health behaviors and positive well-being globally.Science advances · 2023Article
- Chimpanzees organize their social relationships like humans.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era.Nature human behaviour · 2022Review
- Beyond Dunbar circles: a continuous description of social relationships and resource allocation.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
We discuss the structure of human relationship patterns in terms of a new formalism that allows to study resource allocation problems where the cost of the resource may take continuous values. This is in contrast with the main focus of previous studies where relationships were classified in a few, discrete layers (known as Dunbar's circles) with the cost being the same within each layer. We show that with our continuum approach we can identify a parameter [Formula: see text] that is the equivalent of the ratio of relationships between adjacent circles in the discrete case, with a value [Formula: see text]. We confirm this prediction using three different datasets coming from phone records, face-to-face contacts, and interactions in Facebook. As the sample size increases, the distributions of estimated parameters smooth around the predicted value of [Formula: see text]. The existence of a characteristic value of the parameter at the population level indicates that the model is capturing a seemingly universal feature on how humans manage relationships. Our analyses also confirm earlier results showing the existence of social signatures arising from having to allocate finite resources into different relationships, and that the structure of online personal networks mirrors those in the off-line world.
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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.