Psychology in Social Networking
The article I read was “Personality traits and ego-network dynamics” by Simone Centellegher, Eduardo Lopez, Jari Saramaki, and Bruno Lepri. In this paper they introduce an experiment in which they were testing the effects of a person’s personality on their social networks. They tested five main personality traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability. In reading their paper I was immediately drawn to their ideas on Extraversion and Openness to Experience and what effects they had on a person’s social network and social signature.
Along the lines of Introversion vs Extroversion they believe that extroversion leads to closer and more connected groups of friends where they would often bring new groups together to form a single more strongly connected group, whereas an introvert is more likely to have more distinct groups of friends. This result seems to have interesting effects when it comes to the Strong Triadic Principle we discussed in class. In class we stated that the Strong Triadic Principle holds due to societal pressures people feel, but this result leads one to wonder if the Strong Triadic Principle is something derived from our largely extroverted society. If introverts are truly defined as being able to hold more distinct social groups, they may be the causes of the ‘anomalies’ experienced by the Strong Triadic Closure in social networks. I believe it would be a really interesting idea to see how well the Strong Triadic Closure principle and other accepted social networking standards in society hold in an purely introverted social network.
Another interesting idea the article brought to light was that extroverts tend to have a lower persistence of their social signatures when compared to introverts. This seems to indicate that by generating more of these clusters their social signature may adapt easier in order to bring the group together. An introvert tends to have a higher social signature in which they are more defined and their more sectioned groups may not introduce as many new people as an extroverts more clustered social network. Ultimately, I find it really interesting to read about all the differences a person’s psychology can make on their social network and how these differences may be expressed under the societal pressures we talked about in class.
Link: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173110