You can find them everywhere in your own neighborhood—the older gentleman who sweeps the sidewalk in the mornings, the couple that’s always walking a pair of golden retrievers, the grumpy cashier at the supermarket. Chances are you’ve never had a conversation with most of these strangers, but you’ve made assumptions about who they are and what they’re like, to the point where you feel like you kind of know them.
Although scientists have long suspected that our passive interactions with these sorts of “familiar strangers” may be more important than we realize, such encounters have gone largely unstudied. “Usually when people study social networks, they mostly use questionnaires and interviews to analyze connections between family, friends or coworkers, but it’s very difficult to ask questions about people they don’t really know,” says Juliette Stehlé, a physicist affiliated with the Research Center for Economics and Statistics in Paris. “In fact it’s quite a black hole in the study of contacts.”
Now an analysis of the structure of social networks among strangers on the bus, from researchers at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, is filling that void. The study, first released on Arxiv.org and now accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, parses a huge amount of data from public transit users in Singapore, including 20 million bus trips from 2.9 million passengers over the course of five days. It’s the largest network analysis of daily encounters that has ever been performed, and it reveals that interactions between strangers are not as random as some scientists had assumed. Full story...
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Although scientists have long suspected that our passive interactions with these sorts of “familiar strangers” may be more important than we realize, such encounters have gone largely unstudied. “Usually when people study social networks, they mostly use questionnaires and interviews to analyze connections between family, friends or coworkers, but it’s very difficult to ask questions about people they don’t really know,” says Juliette Stehlé, a physicist affiliated with the Research Center for Economics and Statistics in Paris. “In fact it’s quite a black hole in the study of contacts.”
Now an analysis of the structure of social networks among strangers on the bus, from researchers at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, is filling that void. The study, first released on Arxiv.org and now accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, parses a huge amount of data from public transit users in Singapore, including 20 million bus trips from 2.9 million passengers over the course of five days. It’s the largest network analysis of daily encounters that has ever been performed, and it reveals that interactions between strangers are not as random as some scientists had assumed. Full story...
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