Effects of resource and remembering on social networks

To better represent human interactions in social networks, the authors take a network-oriented simulation approach to analyze the evolution of acquaintance networks based on local interaction rules. Our approach takes into consideration shared friendships, resources, remembering, meetings by chance, and arriving and leaving. Our three main findings are: (a) the topological features of acquaintance networks are affected by initial average values for parameters (i.e., resources, remembering, and number of friendships), but not by their statistical distributions; (b) resources, remembering, and initial friendships positively influence increases in average numbers of friends and decreases in degrees of clustering and separation; and (c) widely used fieldwork sampling methods do not capture the actual node degree distributions of social networks. In addition to confirming the successful use of a network-oriented simulation approach to social network research, the findings indicate a strong need for an approach that stresses interactive rules and “what-if” type simulation experiments.