HUMAN VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: AFFINITY AND COMMUNICATION DYNAMICS

Alessandro Cini () and Andrea Guazzini ()
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Alessandro Cini: Department of Systems and Informatic and Center for the Study of Complex Dynamics (CSDC), via S. Marta 3, I-50139, Firenze, Italy
Andrea Guazzini: Department of Psychology and Center for the Study of Complex Dynamics (CSDC), University of Florence, Via di San Salvi 12, 50135, Firenze, Italy

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2013, vol. 16, issue 07, 1-24

Abstract: The modeling of small group dynamics represents a hard challenge despite the effort of disciplines such as sociophysics and social psychology. The interaction between the complex topology of human social structures/communities and the cognitive processes characterizing humans at the microscopic level, are the focus of the classical social cognition paradigm, and it has been deeply researched in the last century. In the present study we used a web basedChat roomas an experimental environment for the study of social interactions within a small group of people. The target of the present study is to explore the relations between the affinity among individual and their communication dynamics. We designed three different experimental tasks (social problem), with a crescent degree of social complexity, in order to test the impact of different social constraints on the evolution of the affinity network, as well as on the dynamics of communication. Our aim is to define the "cognitive recipes" used by the subjects to solve the required social problems. Our results show that the complexity of the social problem affects the relation between affinity and communication networks, influencing at the same time both affinity and opinion. We use the sociophysics and social cognitive models in order to interpret the results, showing the limits of the most diffused sociophysics models when aiming at forecasting the dynamics of a small group.

Keywords: Experimental sociophysics; small group dynamics; virtual human dynamics; cognitive dynamics; social dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525913500343

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