A Quantitative Theory of Social Cohesion
Résumé
With the democratization of computing power and access to rich datasets in the past couple of decades, sociology has witnessed a shift towards a data-oriented and network-based vision of society. More and more, sociological studies move away from basic metrics attached to individuals such as degree, clustering and centrality and focus on the larger patterns of the network such as social communities. Here, we will first introduce a formal model of the community, which contrasts with existing models both in that it provides a mathematical description of the community, whereas several other proposals describe a partition of the network in communities. Moreover, it was validated and confronted to reality through a large scale experiment in which it was observed that it correlated strongly to the subjects' perception of their communities. In a second time, we will leverage this higher level topological description of social network to exhibit links between the underlying social network of subjects and their personality. In effect, this work bridges Sociology and Psychology through the use of Network Science.