DSpace Repository :: Browsing by Author "David-Barrett, Tamas"

Browsing by Author "David-Barrett, Tamas"

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A social complexity sciences approach to measuring social dynamics: applications to Bonobo society and an artist community
(Universidad del Desarrollo. Facultad de Gobierno, 2019) Castillo Sepúlveda, Jorge Alexis; David-Barrett, Tamas
Communication with Family and Friends across the Life Course
(2016) David-Barrett, Tamas; Rotkirch, Anna; Ghosh, Asim; Bhattacharya, Kunal; Monsivais, Daniel; Kaski, Kimmo
Each stage of the human life course is characterised by a distinctive pattern of social relations. We study how the intensity and importance of the closest social contacts vary across the life course, using a large database of mobile communication from a European country. We first determine the most likely social relationship type from these mobile phone records by relating the age and gender of the caller and recipient to the frequency, length, and direction of calls. We then show how communication patterns between parents and children, romantic partner, and friends vary across the six main stages of the adult family life course. Young adulthood is dominated by a gradual shift of call activity from parents to close friends, and then to a romantic partner, culminating in the period of early family formation during which the focus is on the romantic partner. During middle adulthood call patterns suggest a high dependence on the parents of the ego, who, presumably often provide alloparental care, while at this stage female same-gender friendship also peaks. During post-reproductive adulthood, individuals and especially women balance close social contacts among three generations. The age of grandparenthood brings the children entering adulthood and family formation into the focus, and is associated with a realignment of close social contacts especially among women, while the old age is dominated by dependence on their children.
Fertility, kinship and the evolution of mass ideologies
(2017) David-Barrett, Tamas; Dunbar, Robin I. M.
Traditional human societies are organised around kinship, and use kinship networks to generate large scale community projects. This is made possible by a combination of linguistic kin recognition, a uniquely human trait, which is mediated by the reliability of kin as collaborators. When effective fertility falls, this results in two simultaneous effects on social networks: there are fewer kin that can be relied on, and the limiting effect of the local kin-clustering becomes stronger. To capture this phenomenon, we used a model of kinship lineages to build populations with a range of fertility levels combined with a behavioural synchrony model to measure the efficiency of collective action generated on kin networks within populations. Our findings suggest that, whenever effective cooperation depends on kinship, falling fertility creates a crisis when it results in too few kin to join the community project. We conclude that, when societies transition to small effective kin networks, due to falling fertility, increased relative distance to kin due to urbanisation or high mortality due to war or epidemics, they will be able to remain socially cohesive only if they replace disappearing kin networks with quasi-kin alternatives based on membership of guilds or clubs.
Fictional narrative as a variational Bayesian method for estimating social dispositions in large groups
(2019) Carney, James; Robertson, Cole; David-Barrett, Tamas
Modelling intentions in large groups is cognitively costly. Not alone must first order beliefs be tracked (’what does A think about X?’), but also beliefs about beliefs (’what does A think about B’s belief concerning X?’). Thus linear increases in group size impose non-linear increases in cognitive processing resources. At the same time, however, large groups offer coordination advantages relative to smaller groups due to specialisation and increased productive capacity. How might these competing demands be reconciled? We propose that fictional narrative can be understood as a cultural tool for dealing with large groups. Specifically, we argue that prototypical action roles that are removed from real-world interactions function as interpretive priors in a form of variational Bayesian inference, such that they allow estimations can be made of unknown social motives. We offer support for this claim in two ways. Firstly, by evaluating the existing literature on narrative cognition and showing where it anticipates a variational model; and secondly, by simulation, where we show that an agent-based model naturally converges on a set of social categories that resemble narrative across a wide range of starting points.
Herding Friends in Similarity-Based Architecture of Social Networks
(2020) David-Barrett, Tamas
Although friendship as a social behaviour is an evolved trait that shares many similarities with kinship, there is a key difference: to choose friends, one must select few from many. Homophily, i.e., a similarity-based friendship choice heuristic, has been shown to be the main factor in selecting friends. Its function has been associated with the efficiency of collective action via synchronised mental states. Recent empirical results question the general validity of this explanation. Here I offer an alternative hypothesis: similarity-based friendship choice is an individual-level adaptive response to falling clustering coefficient of the social network typical during urbanisation, falling fertility, increased migration. The mathematical model shows how homophily as a friend-choice heuristic affects the network structure: (1) homophilic friendship choice increases the clustering coefficient; (2) network proximity-based and similarity-based friendship choices have additive effects on the clustering coefficient; and (3) societies that face falling fertility, urbanisation, and migration, are likely go through a u-shaped transition period in terms of clustering coefficient. These findings suggest that social identity can be seen as an emergent phenomenon and is the consequence, rather than the driver of, homophilic social dynamics, and offer an alternative explanation for the rise of “fake news” as a societal phenomenon
Homophily in Personality Enhances Group Success Among Real-Life Friends
(2020) Laakasuo, Michael; Rotkirch, Anna; Duijn, Max van; Berg, Venla; Jokela, Markus; David-Barrett, Tamas; Miettinen, Anneli; Pearce, Eiluned; Dunbar, Robin
Personality affects dyadic relations and teamwork, yet its role among groups of friends has been little explored. We examine for the first time whether similarity in personality enhances the effectiveness of real-life friendship groups. Using data from a longitudinal study of a European fraternity (10 male and 15 female groups), we investigate how individual Big Five personality traits were associated with group formation and whether personality homophily related to how successful the groups were over 1 year (N = 147–196). Group success was measured as group performance/identification (adoption of group markers) and as group bonding (using the inclusion-of-other-in-self scale). Results show that individuals’ similarity in neuroticism and conscientiousness predicted group formation. Furthermore, personality similarity was associated with group success, even after controlling for individual’s own personality. Especially higher group-level similarity in conscientiousness was associated with group performance, and with bonding in male groups.
Language as a coordination tool evolves slowly
(2016) David-Barrett, Tamas; Dunbar, Robin I. M.
Social living ultimately depends on coordination between group members, and communication is necessary to make this possible. We suggest that this might have been the key selection pressure acting on the evolution of language in humans and use a behavioural coordination model to explore the impact of communication efficiency on social group coordination. We show that when language production is expensive but there is an individual benefit to the efficiency with which individuals coordinate their behaviour, the evolution of efficient communication is selected for. Contrary to some views of language evolution, the speed of evolution is necessarily slow because there is no advantage in some individuals evolving communication abilities that much exceed those of the community at large. However, once a threshold competence has been achieved, evolution of higher order language skills may indeed be precipitate.
Network Effects of Demographic Transition
(2019) David-Barrett, Tamas
Traditional human societies use two of biology’s solutions to reduce free-riding: by collaborating with relatives, they rely on the mechanism of kin-selection, and by forming highly clustered social kin-networks, they can efficiently use reputation dynamics. Both of these solutions assume the presence of relatives. This paper shows how social networks change during demographic transition. With falling fertility, there are fewer children that could be relatives to one another. As the missing kin are replaced by non-kin friends, local clustering in the social network drops. This effect is compounded by increasing population size, characteristic of demographic transition. The paper also shows that the speed at which reputation spreads in the network slows down due to both falling fertility and increasing group size. Thus, demographic transition weakens both mechanisms for eliminating free-riders: there are fewer relatives around, and reputation spreads slower. This new link between falling fertility and the altered structure of the social network offers novel interpretations of the origins of legal institutions, the Small World phenomenon, the social impact of urbanisation, and the birds-of-a-feather friendship choice heuristic.

Browsing by Author "David-Barrett, Tamas"

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