What is this psychological/sociological principle called?

October 22, 2020 1:32 PM

It's the idea that your friends and acquaintances knowing each other, rather than you just having a bunch of isolated individual friendships, contributes to wellbeing? Or maybe it's just a word for this kind of network interconnection. I read something about this, but I forgot.
posted by lgyre to Human Relations (12 answers total)

Social circle?
posted by erst at 1:37 PM on October 22, 2020

Response by poster: No, that could describe the group, but the word I'm looking for is more like a measurement of how closely your social circle is interlinked, or the idea of it being closely interlinked.
posted by lgyre at 1:42 PM on October 22, 2020

It make not be exactly what you mean, but "social capital" is the concept I'm most familiar with in that regard. At the least, take a look at the wikipedia of social capital and see if it doesn't pinpoint you into what you want.
posted by dpaul at 1:46 PM on October 22, 2020

Social network density? It's presented here as a niche-y academic concept but it's actually pretty straightforward
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:49 PM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

This article seems to refer to it as network linkage, i.e. the more network linkage you have, the less likely you are to fall victim to loneliness. It makes sense, if you only have 4 links, and they all fall off, and THOSE people don't have any overlapping links, there's no security net under your net.
posted by FirstMateKate at 1:49 PM on October 22, 2020

Social Network Density is the term used to refer to this in network analysis. I don't know of any evidence that higher density makes anything in particular better and I couldn't find anything in a quick google scholar search. Generally what matters for wellbeing is how the individual perceives their social connections: If they feel like the connections are meaningful and warm they will feel better. This might go up or down when density increases depending on the individual.
posted by JZig at 1:49 PM on October 22, 2020

What you're describing is network density, but you might (also? instead?) be thinking of the concept of "the strength of weak ties." There's an academic article on this here.
posted by quiet coyote at 1:59 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

In graph/network theory it's called network density, the proportion of friendships that exist out of possible friendships. If it's a binary friends/not friends relationship, then for a group of N people you have N choose 2, or n!/(2(n-2)!) possible friendships.

But friendship probably isn't binary. In fact it's probably not solely positive. You'd probably get something closer by averaging all the edge weights (relationship "factors" where pure enemy is -1 and best friend is +1) between all possible nodes (people). Just spitballing though.

Each node (person) has a measure called local connectivity, which is based on connectedness of nodes (people) connected to them. That's probably closer to what you'd want to look at. Or maybe even graph centrality.

After a quick google, is this maybe the work you read? Or this or this?
posted by supercres at 2:01 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Perhaps is it’s multiplexity or multiplex relationships where nodes are connected to more than one other node rather than there being one point in the centre that all other nodes are connected to.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:13 PM on October 22, 2020

iirc, this concept is explored in the weak ties article that quiet coyote linked above.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:17 PM on October 22, 2020

As a more general concept that applies more broadly than just social cirlcles -- "network effects"
posted by yohko at 4:56 PM on October 22, 2020

In technical terms, this is social network closure. Imagine a 1950s suburb where everyone knows everyone. This is also the principle behind social network brokerage, where one person connects two communities that are not otherwise connected.

With some work, social networks can be visualized using a sociogram, where this pattern would be visible.

/sociologist
posted by ec2y at 9:09 PM on October 27, 2020