Multirelational organization of large-scale social networks in an online world
Multirelational organization of large-scale social networks in an online world
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1004008107
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发表时间：
2010-08-03
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Thurner, Stefan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Szell, Michael;Lambiotte, Renaud;Thurner, Stefan
通过在线媒体收集个人指纹的能力彻底改变了研究人员探索人类社会的方式。社会系统可以看作是大量复杂社会网络的非线性叠加，其中节点代表个体，链接捕捉各种不同的社会关系。很多人把重点放在社会互动的网络拓扑结构上，然而，由于缺乏数据，这些互动的多维性质在很大程度上被忽视了。在这里，我们第一次分析了一个由30多万名大型多人在线游戏玩家组成的社会的完整、多关系、大型社交网络。我们提取了玩家之间六种不同类型的一对一互动的网络。其中三个有积极的含义(友谊、交流、贸易)，三个有负面的(敌意、武装侵略、惩罚)。我们首先将这些类型的网络作为独立的实体进行分析，发现负交互作用与正交互作用的不同之处在于它们的互惠性较低，聚集性较弱，以及厚尾度分布。然后，我们探讨不同网络类型的相互依赖如何决定社会系统的组织。特别是，我们研究了不同类型链接之间的相关性和重叠，并展示了个人在不同网络中扮演不同角色的趋势。为了展示这种方法的力量，我们提出了对长期存在的结构平衡理论的首次经验性大规模验证，重点放在特定的友谊和敌意关系的多重网络上。
The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be seen as a nonlinear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks, where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different social relations. Much emphasis has been put on the network topology of social interactions, however, the multidimensional nature of these interactions has largely been ignored, mostly because of lack of data. Here, for the first time, we analyze a complete, multirelational, large social network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game. We extract networks of six different types of one-to-one interactions between the players. Three of them carry a positive connotation (friendship, communication, trade), three a negative (enmity, armed aggression, punishment). We first analyze these types of networks as separate entities and find that negative interactions differ from positive interactions by their lower reciprocity, weaker clustering, and fatter-tail degree distribution. We then explore how the interdependence of different network types determines the organization of the social system. In particular, we study correlations and overlap between different types of links and demonstrate the tendency of individuals to play different roles in different networks. As a demonstration of the power of the approach, we present the first empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity relations.