Cognizing Social Networks
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
First Advisor
Christakis, Nicholas
Abstract
Human social networks are central to social life. They are a central element of social structure, characterizing the connections through which ideas, information, and sentiments spread between people. Consequently, social networks are a central feature of social inquiry. However, they are typically taken to be objective structures that are purely external to their inhabitants, and shape human social behavior surreptitiously. Instead, in this dissertation, I emphasize that social networks also exist as representations in the minds of their constituents. Here, I broadly examine how people understand their social world, through a large-scale survey of individual perceptions of social network structure in 33 villages in rural Honduras. Chapter 1 introduces the setting of the dissertation. Previous work on social cognition has considered how individuals internalize, learn, and perceive the social world they inhabit. However, more rarely have individual perceptions of social networks been comprehensively studied, and only in small-scale networks and in stylized settings. In Chapter 2, I provide a view into theoretical debates that foreground the empirical project in this dissertation. Most empirical work on social cognition focuses on individuals' perceptions of other individuals. While there is a strain of empirical research that regards individual cognition of social structure, it has not played a significant role in social theory or in other realms of social explanation. Here, I explain this trend with reference to skepticism about capacities of individuals' to understand their social world, and practical limitations that stem from difficulty in data collection and analysis. In Chapter 3 review and engage the theoretical and empirical literature on cognition and social networks. Research in this area spans the cognitive, neural, and social sciences with methods that range from behavioral experiments, functional magnetic resonance imaging, to the collection of network data in the field. Together, these methods are used to uncover the social-structural, psychological, and biological foundations of individual awareness of social structure. In this chapter, I review the literature on attempts to assess network perceptions, formalized as cognitive social structures, which finds that, while individuals have an extensive ability to track the relationships around them, they do in a distinctly biased fashion. In Chapter 4, I outline the study location and context. This dissertation is among the first to collect data on perceptions of network structure in medium-size networks. Furthermore, this study collects data on network perceptions in a rich face-to-face social setting, namely village networks in rural Honduras, a poor and isolated region in the western highlands of the country on a large scale. This chapter broadly outlines the setting of data collection in Copan, in a set of 33 villages (to date) that range from 49 to 337 persons in size. I outline the technical details of a novel sampling procedure in Chapter 5. This approach is designed to circumvent traditional limitations on the size of social networks in which perceptions of those social networks may be studied. This approach affords an investigation of cognitive social structures in broader settings than typically afforded by traditional approaches in the literature. The sampling procedure is a stratified design, where ties are sampled in equal numbers at increasing distance to the survey respondent. Survey respondents are queried about three relationships for 40 pairs of individuals in their social orbit, where roughly half of the ties exist, and half do not in the underlying social network. In Chapter 6, I quantify, for each villager, the accuracy of their social perception and evaluate the properties of perceivers that are associated with the increased accuracy of social perception in two networks: free time and personal private across 33 villages. This study finds, counterintuitively, that accuracy in perception of relationships increases with geodesic distance in the village networks, due to decreases in individuals' false positive rate. This finding suggests that individuals falsely assume that their immediate neighborhood is denser than it actually is. Additionally, we examine the impact of various demographic and network centrality measures on acuity. In Chapter 7, I consider the properties of the ties elicited in the survey, and the individuals that constitute those relationships. I examine networks generated by the free time and personal private relationships across data from 33 villages. Here, we find evidence that the accuracy of individuals in reporting the existence of ties varies systematically with the aggregated properties of those ties (e.g., aggregated as the mean age of individuals in a pair), which may indicate that individuals expect significantly greater similarity in their networks than actually obtains and over-emphasize the role of kinship in determining affiliation patterns more generally in the social life of the villages. In the closing chapter, I briefly summarize the empirical findings from this dissertation in a broader theoretical context and outline directions for future work.
Recommended Citation
Feltham, Eric Martin, "Cognizing Social Networks" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1029.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1029
