The latent cognitive structures of social networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tensor-based method to identify shared cognitive heuristics in social network perceptions, revealing latent cognitive structures and social-cognitive agreement among individuals.

Contribution

It proposes a novel tensor decomposition approach to model and analyze multiple perceptions of social networks, linking cognitive heuristics to social structure detection.

Findings

Identified shared cognitive structures across different social networks.

Developed a statistical test for social-cognitive agreement.

Analyzed four CSS datasets revealing insights into cognitive heuristics.

Abstract

When people are asked to recall their social networks, theoretical and empirical work tells us that they rely on shortcuts, or heuristics. Cognitive Social Structures (CSS) are multilayer social networks where each layer corresponds to an individual's perception of the network. With multiple perceptions of the same network, CSSs contain rich information about how these heuristics manifest, motivating the question, Can we identify people who share the same heuristics? In this work, we propose a method for identifying cognitive structure across multiple network perceptions, analogous to how community detection aims to identify social structure in a network. To simultaneously model the joint latent social and cognitive structure, we study CSSs as three-dimensional tensors, employing low-rank nonnegative Tucker decompositions (NNTuck) to approximate the CSS--a procedure closely related to estimating a multilayer stochastic block model (SBM) from such data. We propose the resulting latent cognitive space as an operationalization of the sociological theory of social cognition by identifying individuals who share relational schema. In addition to modeling cognitively independent, dependent, and redundant networks, we propose a specific model instance and related statistical test for testing when there is social-cognitive agreement in a network: when the social and cognitive structures are equivalent. We use our approach to analyze four different CSSs and give insights into the latent cognitive structures of those networks.