Exploring variation in active network size: Constraints and ego characteristics

By Susan C. Roberts, Robin I. M. Dunbar, Thomas V. Pollet, Toon Kuppens. Soc. Networks, 2009

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Studies of active personal networks have primarily focused on providing reliable estimates of the size of the network. In this study, we examine how compositional properties of the network and ego characteristics are related to variation in network size. There was a negative relationship between mean emotional closeness and network size, for both related and unrelated networks. Further, there was a distinct upper bound on total network size. These results suggest that there are constraints both on the absolute number of individuals that ego can maintain in the network, and also on the emotional intensity of the relationships that ego can maintain with those individuals.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6217f02fed0f59b39e4566be0970e043d88825eb

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In Clinical Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Sharing with Friends versus Strangers: How Interpersonal Closeness Influences Word-of-Mouth Valence (2016, background): “Given that consumers tend to feel closer to one another in small-sized (vs. large-sized) communities (Roberts et al. 2009), companies aiming to spread positive WOM might focus on large-sized over small-sized communities because the former might be more likely to spread positive WOM than the latter.”
Ventromedial prefrontal volume predicts understanding of others and social network size (2011, background): “For present purposes, we have focused on the second layer, sometimes known as the sympathy group (Buys and Larson, 1979) because it maximizes the range of variation across individuals while at the same time minimizing the time and effort required to complete the questionnaire, as well as reducing th”
Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks? (2016, background): “how far away they lived, and so how easy it might be to meet up with them) or the distinction between family and friends (an important feature of face-to-face networks [22]).”
The structure of online social networks mirrors those in the offline world (2015, background): “This becomes of particular interest in the light of the finding that there appears to be a cognitive limit on the size of natural face-to-face social networks (Dunbar, 1993; Roberts et al., 2009; Sutcliffe et al., 2012).”
Social Networks and Cognition (2020, background): “Sub-sequent research has generally supported this link (Barton 1996; Dunbar 1993, 1995; Gonçalves et al. 2011; Kudo & Dunbar 2001; Stiller & Dunbar 2007) and has identified cognitive limits on social network size (Roberts et al. 2009).”
How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age (2016, background): “The smaller estimates agree with the observation of Roberts et al. (2009) that the number of social contacts people have is limited to some 150, although of course people know many more names (of humans and places) than the individuals they have personal relationships with.”
The costs of family and friends: an 18-month longitudinal study of relationship maintenance and decay (2011, methodology): “These constraints appear to produce an upper bound to active network size of around 150, with the size of the kin network constraining the size of the friendship network (Roberts et al., 2009).”
Communication in social networks: Effects of kinship, network size, and emotional closeness (2011, background): “In general, however, the constraints that limit the number of individuals that can be maintained at any given level of emotional intensity should operate on males and females equally (Roberts et al., 2009).”
egoSlider: Visual Analysis of Egocentric Network Evolution (2016, background): “The macroscopic level questions aim to obtain a whole picture of all ego-networks from a large group of people [6, 14, 30, 48]: Q1 What are the overall patterns of a large group of people’s egonetworks at each time step? Are there any clusters of people with similar ego-networks? Are there any outli”
Personality and Political Discussion (2011, background): “There is also a substantial body of research on the influence of demographic variables on network characteristics outside of political science (see Roberts et al. 2009 ).”