Participation Shifts Explain Degree Distribution in a Human Communications Network

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 24. Social Networks

Abstract

Human interpersonal communications drive political, technological, and economic systems, placing importance on network link prediction as a fundamental problem of the social sciences. These systems are often described at the network-level by degree counts -- the number of communication links associated with individuals in the network -- that often follow approximate Pareto distributions, a divergence from Poisson-distributed counts associated with random chance. A defining scientific challenge is to understand the human collaborative mechanisms and inter-personal dynamics -- manifest at the nodal-level of the individual in the network -- that give rise to such heavy-tailed degree distributions at the network-level. Degree distributions are often explained by cumulative advantage, also referred to as individual preferential attachment. Analysis of an organization's email network suggests that these degree distributions may be caused by the existence of participation-shift dynamics that are necessary for coherent communication between humans. We find that the email network's degree distribution is best explained by turn-taking and turn-continuing norms present in most human communication. This diverges from preferential-attachment explanations often associated with long-tailed degree distributions in social systems.

Authors

• C. Ben Gibson, Army Research Lab

• Norbou Buchler, Army Research Lab

• Claire La Fleur, Army Research Lab

• Blaine Hoffman, Army Research Lab