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Abstract
How has the passage of time impacted the ego networks of males and females? I compare the homophily and social distances of males and females using the 1985 and 2004 GSS networks modules. The results indicate that change has been gradual and incremental rather than radical. In 2004 less social distance separates associates for women than for men, and males differentiate more among levels of education. The results suggest that macro-level structural changes have not been sufficient to produce similarly large changes in ego network composition.

AbstractSocial influence is frequently measured through an ego's direct ties. Although influence may also stem from an ego's indirect ties, reference group, and casual contacts, it is difficult to capture their impact using existing network methods. We identify and trace the influence stemming from an ego's "familiar others," consisting of those socially similar individuals with whom the ego comes in contact at school, but does not necessarily share a relationship. To evaluate the role of familiar others, we investigate unhealthy weight behaviors in adolescence using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Our results demonstrate that familiar others' unhealthy weight-related behaviors are strong predictors of the ego's own weight behaviors, net of immediate alters' behaviors, and individual-level characteristics. Further, we find that this relationship is stronger and more robust than that between egos and their direct ties. These results suggest that familiar others constitute a key source of social influence that is distinct from the influence of network alters.

AbstractEgo networks are thought to be influenced by the opportunities provided to associate with others given by our master statuses (e.g., race or sex), by the preferences individuals possess for interaction given our personality traits (e.g., extroverted or neurotic), and by the capacity to manage interactions on an ongoing basis given our cognitive ability to recall network information. However, prior research has been unable to examine all three classes of predictors concurrently. We rectify this deficiency in the literature by using a novel dataset of nearly 1000 respondents collected using controlled laboratory designs; using this dataset, we can simultaneously examine the impact of master statuses, personality traits, and social cognitive competencies on ego network size, structure (i.e., density), and composition (i.e., diversity). We find that all classes of predictors influence our ego networks, though in different ways, and point to new avenues for research into human sociability.

Social network analysis, now often thought of simply as network science, has penetrated nearly every scientific and many scholarly fields and has become an indispensable resource. Yet, social networks are special by virtue of being specifically social, and our growing understanding of the brain is affecting our understanding of how social networks form, mature, and are exploited by their members. We discuss the expanding research on how the brain manages social information, how this information is heuristically processed, and how network cognitions are affected by situation and circumstance. In the process, we argue that the cognitive turn in social networks exemplifies the modern conception of the brain as fundamentally reprogrammable by experience and circumstance. Far from social networks being dependent upon the brain, we anticipate a modern view in which cognition and social networks coconstitute each other.