Triadic Closure helps humans remember a larger social network
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep01513
In your own lifetime, you are bound to know a multitude people and therefore accumulate a large social network. But how is it possible for you to remember so many of these connections? Research by Matthew Brashears, a sociologist from our very own Cornell University, found that it is not the physical size of the brain that allows us to maintain our social networks, but rather humans’ efficient mental processes. Humans have useful schemata, which are “mental frameworks that organize the processing of information and influence its recall from memory” (Brashears). In his experiment, participants were tasked with studying one of four vignettes describing a fifteen person social network, completing a memory clearing exercise, and then attempting to reproduce the network from the vignette. Results found that people best remembered the social networks with kinship labels (“mother”, “brother”) and relationships connected by triadic closure.
Brashears’s research directly relates to the course because it shows the diversity of applications of triadic closure. The principle helps the human brain to more efficiently remember complex social structures because the brain can infer, rather than memorize, multiple relationship ties. For example, if people A-B and B-C are connected, then A-C must also be connected. This means that it is only necessary for the brain to remember two ties, because the third tie can be inferred. The conclusion that triadic closure compresses social information lead to the consideration of other types of schemata beneficial to remembering social networks. Another one of these schemata is structural balance, also a course topic, which can be key to simplifying the “cognitive demands of maintaining relationships” (Brashears). Because your own positive/negative opinions of others match those opinions of your connections, structural balance reduces the number of relationships to track from n(n-1) to just n-1 (Brashears). Triadic closure and structural balance are just some mental schema which allow the human mind to maintain each own complex social network.