Publication: Behavior and context
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2023-02-07
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2023-02-07
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Abstract
SUMMARY, REMARKS AND FUTURE WORK. Culture is one of the classical examples that is normally used to define
a complex system. The inherent complexity of humans interacting
directly provides enough diversity of phenomena, but if we also
consider sociological problems that live in wider timescales, then it
becomes boundless. The subject of the interaction is no more the person
alone, but the different social constructs that coexist within a society,
as, for example, different kind of social norms and expressions.
The growing complexity of social systems is also confusing
because it has not been traditionally understood in this way, which
is logical because we have studied society from the different perspectives
that have appeared historically. Humanities have studied the
different holistic products that appear from complexity, like literature,
philosophy or the different types of artistic studies. As we stated in
the introduction, a different perspective appeared when the scientific
method started comparative studies of society, bringing new tools,
mainly modelling of general effects and statistics. Herbert Spencer
popularized the analogy of considering the society as a human being,
this is, as a cooperative organization of the different organs and tissues
in order to provide a collective structure. And this is the main
spirit of complexity sciences, which started to have more importance
in the end of the XX century, giving rise to a new wave on how to
understand quantitatively social systems.
At this moment, we recall the title of this thesis: Behavior and
context. The problem in the description of the context is a methodological
one. Context is the conjunction of relevant circumstances correlated
with the social description of an individual. Traditionally, the
social description of a variable has been related with socioeconomic
indicators, where the presence of the social structure is only understood
with scalar variables. In this work, we show the importance of
the network structure in the resemblance of this social profile, and
how geometry may act as a proxy of this social variables containing,
potentially, more information than just scalar variables. The behavior
is correlated with the geometry of this social profile.
The importance of the network version of the social profile
can be checked by its correlation with the cultural variables of the ego.
This is important because it reveals an idiosyncratic manner of making
social relationships, and, therefore, the role of social institutions.
But the network version is not only a proxy for cultural variables,
it is a true identifier of people. A proof of this is the connection between
personal profiles and probability of connection, showing that the similarity in the close structural network may be a proxy for social
homophily, connected, therefore, to personal and cultural values.
Therefore, we have identified a unit component (in terms of measure)
of the individual, social and cultural influence on individuals, providing
a personal signature around which social homophily appears,
even in a complex context where culture and social values play a key
role.
At the end of the day, this thesis could be summarized by
saying that the geometric structure of the close social environment
is a signature of the individual and of its social and cultural values.
Similarity in this signature is related to social homophily.
The other main message that can be extracted from this thesis
is related to the importance of ethnic groups in social modelling.
Social modelling can not be replicated easily with a markovian model
with binary interactions. This is due to the inherent complexity that
was pointed out at the beginning of the chapter. Social phenomena exist
in several timescales, and because of this they have a lot of implicit
information. An ethnic group may exist because of this implicit information,
due to, for example, a pre-existing social symbolism; but, in
order to arise spontaneously from the social outcome of a binary process
(in the way game theory works), some optimization is needed.
This is, the existence of a marker does not provide, necessarily, a social
separation depending on that variable, if this variable does not
provide some kind of improvement in the fitness. This advantage
may exist due to an asymmetrical social configuration, for example, in
the case of a hierarchy. Previous works have shown the spontaneous
appearance of this kind of structures [102], remarking again the importance
of the different timescales in this kind of phenomena. An
asymmetric social configuration allows the function to be optimized
with ethnic markers, and the arena where cultures may compete, reinforcing
the roles of their individuals, and building therefore, the
different social profiles.
With respect to the experimental part, the results that we obtain
suggest that ethnic markers experiment should be replicated in
contexts with different social configurations, studying, again, as the
title suggests, the dependence on the context. It would be interesting
the replication of simple ethnic separation altogether with a hierarchy
or some reputation system. Once more, following the spirit of all
the thesis, connects the importance of the ethnic, personal identifications
with the social organization, that regulates its importance in the
social equilibrium.
In view of these conclusions, future works in this field should
go deeper into the importance of the geometric social profile of the
ego networks as an individual identifier. In this case, more data needs
to be collected, in order to research other sociological variables like
different aspects of culture, religion, political views or socioeconomic
measures. Note that in the case of the present work, we have focused on the nationality, as the dataset provided us with a diverse sample
of nationalities and the control group. In order to study other sociological
variables, like wealth, race, gender or a particular social norm,
new data is needed that fits those necessities.
Moreover, we have focused on networks centered in the ego,
where we have a perspective on the close social structure. It would be
also interesting to study how much information is needed in order to
study different kinds of networks. This is interesting from a practical
point of view, as it could help to use different datasets to provide further
proofs of the existence of the social signature, but also to check
more properties of this measure. It would be interesting, for example,
to study if family networks provide us enough information to
talk about the different social values and/or material conditions of
different families. If the information about the signatures still can be
extracted, new datasets could be reused to make a stronger point
about the cultural signature, saving the time of collecting new ego
networks.
Another possible path to follow in the future could be the
study of signed networks together with the cultural profile. In our
works, we have studied the importance of the social signature in order
to determine the cultural profile, and its importance in the outcome
of a relationship. It would be interesting to show the connection between
these two elements, providing a relationship between cultural
or socioeconomic variables and the friends or enemies an individual
may have.
The final suggestion for future work is related to the measure
of properties of this social signature.We have stressed in the introduction
(and in several chapters of the thesis) that the cultural values are
a holistic product, which may be assumed and created by collectivities.
In this work we have focused on a model that is based in the
relationship between individual and its environment (in a mean-field
like approach), but this is not needed. Considering again the example
of the family, perhaps the family could be understood as a whole, and
study the problem of its close social environment from a perspective
of networks. Given that the problem of culture exists in several scales,
it would be interesting to check if new relationships arise from this
point of view.
At the end of the day, all of these suggestions are basically
related to checking the potential of the measure. This poses also an
ethical question: if the potential of the social signature is shown in
more contexts, and it correlates with personal information, it is important
that these studies (public or private) are carried with the utmost
concert about their possible implications and misuses.
Description
Mención Internacional en el tÃtulo de doctor
Keywords
Machine learning algorithms, Reinforcement learning, Experimental game theory, Grid/Group theory, Computational social modeling, Social networks, Social structure