Influence of Personal Preferences on Link Dynamics in Social Networks

TL;DR

This study investigates how personal preferences influence the formation and dissolution of social links among university students, using rich attribute data and a novel preference-based prediction method for both behavioral and cognitive networks.

Contribution

Introduces a method to quantify student preferences for attributes and demonstrates their predictive power for link dynamics in social networks.

Findings

Preferences for political views strongly predict link changes.

Shared activities are significant predictors of social tie formation.

Personal preferences influence both behavioral and cognitive network dynamics.

Abstract

We study a unique network dataset including periodic surveys and electronic logs of dyadic contacts via smartphones. The participants were a sample of freshmen entering university in the Fall 2011. Their opinions on a variety of political and social issues and lists of activities on campus were regularly recorded at the beginning and end of each semester for the first three years of study. We identify a behavioral network defined by call and text data, and a cognitive network based on friendship nominations in ego-network surveys. Both networks are limited to study participants. Since a wide range of attributes on each node were collected in self-reports, we refer to these networks as attribute-rich networks. We study whether student preferences for certain attributes of friends can predict formation and dissolution of edges in both networks. We introduce a method for computing student preferences for different attributes which we use to predict link formation and dissolution. We then rank these attributes according to their importance for making predictions. We find that personal preferences, in particular political views, and preferences for common activities help predict link formation and dissolution in both the behavioral and cognitive networks.