The Strength of Long Ties

• In Event: 260 - Section on Mathematical Sociology Paper Session. Advances in Mathematical Sociology

Abstract

We report the surprising discovery of “social wormholes” that allow information, beliefs, and opinions to travel between close friends across vast network distances. Previous research has hypothesized the existence of weak social ties between acquaintances that create shortcuts through social space, thereby promoting access to otherwise unavailable information, greater social integration, and more rapid diffusion of information. However, the global network data needed to identify and fully measure these shortcuts to test the weak tie hypothesis have not been available until recently. Using communication network data for 56M Twitter users from eight countries with high Twitter penetration, we confirm the existence of long-range ties but also discover that these ties are much stronger than previously theorized in terms of the frequency of interaction, the balance in communication, and the affect words observed in those interactions. We examine three explanations: 1) users with few communication neighbors tend to invest heavily in their relations with one another but with a lower probability of having a neighbor in common; 2) users purposefully maintain long-range ties to gain instrumental benefits; 3) geographically long-distance network neighbors who do not share common third-party neighbors use Twitter as a complement to face-to-face interaction. Finally, we present a tentative fourth explanation based on differential rates of tie decay as a direction for future research.

Authors

• Patrick Park, Northwestern University

• Michael W. Macy, Cornell University