CAREER: Understanding how knowledge of social networks shapes thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

Human beings form complex social networks. Those networks are composed of numerous intense bonds, including those between family members, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and many others. People are fundamentally interested in knowing where others sit in their real-world social networks.

Discovering “degrees of separation” and knowing who is especially well-connected consumes significant attention. The cognitive demands of tracking relationships in such networks, and calibrating one’s behavior accordingly, are likely to have been a driving force in human brain evolution. Additionally, the human capacity for understanding social networks is central to many aspects of everyday functioning, including interpersonal trust, empathy, and social influence.

Yet, little is known about how the human brain encodes the structure of the social networks in which it is embedded, or how this knowledge shapes downstream mental processing and behavior. This project seeks to understand how knowledge of others’ positions in one’s social network shapes thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The research considers individual differences in attunement to this information, and how context shapes representations of social networks.

The related educational and training components of the project include the creation of mentored research and professional development opportunities for underrepresented students from community colleges and the development of a new graduate course focused on advanced methods in social neuroscience.

This project integrates approaches from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social network analysis to illuminate how knowledge of social networks shapes affect, behavior, and cognition. Several studies examine the social networks of a series of bounded communities. Subsets of community members complete behavioral and/or neuroimaging experiments that seek to delineate (1) the behavioral, cognitive, and affective consequences of knowledge of others’ positions in one’s social network, and (2) how the mental representation of such knowledge varies across contexts and individuals.

One specific focus is on how perceptions of distance in social networks and network centrality influences prosocial behavior. The results of the research will inform broader efforts to better understand social influence and interpersonal trust. Understanding these phenomena will also inform efforts in the national security community to mitigate the targeted spread of misinformation in social networks.

This project is supported with co-funding from the Cognitive Neuroscience and Human Networks and Data Science (HNDS-R) Programs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.