Quantitative study of how strangers discover mutual friends
Abstract
After talking to a stranger for a few minutes, you and the stranger realize that you are linked through a common friend or through a short chain of acquaintances. This ubiquitous situation, often experienced by many of us, is strongly related to the large-scale structural organization of the network of social ties, whose characterization is currently an open problem. Here we offer an explanation to this well-known phenomenon. The key mechanisms are the correlation between friendship ties among people and the position of their social groups, as well as the correlation between the positions of different social groups to which one person belongs. Our result gives a criterion for plausible models of social networks, which is relevant to pressing issues of significant social concern such as spread of diseases and homeland defense.Keywords
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