Absence makes the heart grow fonder: social compensation when failure to interact risks weakening a relationship

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• 作者：Kunal Bhattacharya ; Asim Ghosh ; Daniel Monsivais ; Robin Dunbar…
• 关键词：social networks ; social investment ; relationships ; mobile phone ; maintenance behaviour
• 刊名：EPJ Data Science
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：December 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：6
• 期：1
• 全文大小：1407KB
• 刊物主题：Computer Appl. in Social and Behavioral Sciences; Data-driven Science, Modeling and Theory Building; Complexity;
• 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• ISSN：2193-1127
• 卷排序：6

文摘

Social networks require active relationship maintenance if they are to be kept at a constant level of emotional closeness. For primates, including humans, failure to interact leads inexorably to a decline in relationship quality, and a consequent loss of the benefits that derive from individual relationships. As a result, many social species compensate for weakened relationships by investing more heavily in them. Here we study how humans behave in similar situations, using data from mobile call detail records from a European country. For the less frequent contacts between pairs of communicating individuals we observe a logarithmic dependence of the duration of the succeeding call on the time gap with the previous call. We find that such behaviour is likely when the individuals in these dyadic pairs have the same gender and are in the same age bracket as well as being geographically distant. Our results indicate that these pairs deliberately invest more time in communication so as to reinforce their social bonding and prevent their relationships decaying when these are threatened by lack of interaction.