How Our Mind Maps Social Webs

Rebecca Lewis March 22, 2013

If a person’s Facebook account reflects his or her true network connections, it can be a big wonder how the human brain could store and remember names of people, their relationship with each other, and their relationship with the person. Turns out though, the brain doesn’t actually memorise all this stuff, it simply follows a pattern.

In a randomised laboratory experiment, Matthew Brashears, assistant sociology professor at Cornell University, examined the extent to which triadic culture and kin labels help a person improve the recall of information about his or her social network. For the study, four conditions were employed to describe the relationship of 15 individuals –kinship labels, triadic information, combination of triads and kinships, and the absence of any social cue.

300 people participated in the experiment. All of them were asked to read paragraphs that describe a group of people and how they relate to each other. Then, participants were asked to recall as many ties as possible.

Brashears noticed that when the participants read paragraphs that contain both triads and kinships, participants’ recall of social ties improved by 50 per cent compared to those whose paragraphs contained neither. Meanwhile, participants performed poorly in recalling social ties when they only obtained information about kinships. Brashears said looking at kinships alone is like trying to remember a random number sequence by using only the ’increase by two’ rule.

Heuristic Compression

Although it appears that humans keep track of social information by memorising it, human networks are too large and complicated to be cognitively managed. Thus, the human brain does not simply store information, but adapt compression heuristics – a process that allows the brain to store a huge number of information without increasing its volume. Brashears’ study suggests that recalling social ties involves simplifying rules. And in most instances, recall of social ties becomes easier when it involves a relationship of at least 3 people who know each other.

According to Brashears, the research may help explain some peculiarities of human networks, such as transitivity. For instance, if A and B are friends, and B is also friends with C, it is possible that C and A are friends as well, or perhaps, they know each other. He believes that individuals who conform to these rules tend to have bigger and more successful networks. Brashears also suggests that his findings can benefit medical researchers, particularly in understanding why some people don’t grasp social intricacies than others. Being able to understand how social information is compressed may also contribute to the understanding of social anxiety and autism spectrum, he added.

Source of this article:

Humans use Compression Heuristics to Improve the Recall of Social Networks