The latent cognitive structures of social networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Aguiar, Izabel, Ugander, Johan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Aguiar, Izabel
Ugander, Johan
author_facet Aguiar, Izabel
Ugander, Johan
contents When people are asked to recall their social networks, theoretical and empirical work tells us that they rely on shortcuts, or heuristics. Cognitive Social Structures (CSS) are multilayer social networks where each layer corresponds to an individual's perception of the network. With multiple perceptions of the same network, CSSs contain rich information about how these heuristics manifest, motivating the question, Can we identify people who share the same heuristics? In this work, we propose a method for identifying cognitive structure across multiple network perceptions, analogous to how community detection aims to identify social structure in a network. To simultaneously model the joint latent social and cognitive structure, we study CSSs as three-dimensional tensors, employing low-rank nonnegative Tucker decompositions (NNTuck) to approximate the CSS--a procedure closely related to estimating a multilayer stochastic block model (SBM) from such data. We propose the resulting latent cognitive space as an operationalization of the sociological theory of social cognition by identifying individuals who share relational schema. In addition to modeling cognitively independent, dependent, and redundant networks, we propose a specific model instance and related statistical test for testing when there is social-cognitive agreement in a network: when the social and cognitive structures are equivalent. We use our approach to analyze four different CSSs and give insights into the latent cognitive structures of those networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_11639
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The latent cognitive structures of social networks
Aguiar, Izabel
Ugander, Johan
Social and Information Networks
When people are asked to recall their social networks, theoretical and empirical work tells us that they rely on shortcuts, or heuristics. Cognitive Social Structures (CSS) are multilayer social networks where each layer corresponds to an individual's perception of the network. With multiple perceptions of the same network, CSSs contain rich information about how these heuristics manifest, motivating the question, Can we identify people who share the same heuristics? In this work, we propose a method for identifying cognitive structure across multiple network perceptions, analogous to how community detection aims to identify social structure in a network. To simultaneously model the joint latent social and cognitive structure, we study CSSs as three-dimensional tensors, employing low-rank nonnegative Tucker decompositions (NNTuck) to approximate the CSS--a procedure closely related to estimating a multilayer stochastic block model (SBM) from such data. We propose the resulting latent cognitive space as an operationalization of the sociological theory of social cognition by identifying individuals who share relational schema. In addition to modeling cognitively independent, dependent, and redundant networks, we propose a specific model instance and related statistical test for testing when there is social-cognitive agreement in a network: when the social and cognitive structures are equivalent. We use our approach to analyze four different CSSs and give insights into the latent cognitive structures of those networks.
title The latent cognitive structures of social networks
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11639