On the Social Influence in Human Behavior: Physical, Homophily, and Social Communities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how physical, homophily, and social communities influence human behavior, demonstrating that multiple community types significantly affect social influence and can predict participation and behavioral phenotypes.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of different community types' roles in social influence and presents a novel classification of behavioral phenotypes based on social influence levels.

Findings

Social influence correlates with physical, homophily, and social communities.

Community-based features improve prediction of social event participation.

First evidence of behavioral phenotypes related to social influence.

Abstract

Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we propose to examine the role that distinct communities, linked to these factors, play as sources of social influence. The ego network is typically used in the social influence analysis. Our hypothesis is that individuals are embedded in communities not only related to their direct social relationships, but that involve different and complex forces. We analyze physical, homophily, and social communities to evaluate their relation with subjects' behavior. We prove that social influence is correlated with these communities, and each one of them is (differently) significant for individuals. We define community-based features, which reflect the subject involvement in these groups, and we use them with a supervised learning algorithm to predict subject participation in social events. Results indicate that both communities and ego network are relevant sources of social influence, confirming that the ego network alone is not sufficient to explain this phenomenon. Moreover, we classify users according to the degree of social influence they experienced with respect to their groups, recognizing classes of behavioral phenotypes. To our knowledge, this is the first work that proves the existence of phenotypes related to the social influence phenomenon.