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16 August 2006

"Network elasticity" and "individual plasticity"

I briefly want to plug these two book end constructs that I framed in a paper I wrote some years ago in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology ("The Co-evolution of Network and Individual"), which examined how networks and nodes co-evolve. Essentially, network elasticity captures how endogenous the network is—how much nodes get to choose who they connect to. Individual plasticity, in turn, captures how endogenous “attributes" are—how much individuals are affected by who they are connected to. In this paper (and the discussion here) I apply these ideas to social influence processes, but the concepts are more general than that. I would argue that different social systems differ dramatically in how elastic their networks are, and how plastic the nodes are, which, in turn, has certain systemic implications.

The idea that individuals affect their network as compared to being affected by their network are sometimes placed at opposite ends of the spectrum; but of course, they are really orthogonal processes. Since this paper was written, statistical tools (e.g., by Tom Snijders and his team with Siena) have been refined to examine just such a coevolutionary process. My focus is really on something different than estimating the underlying transition probabilities for the change in state of particular relationships or nodes.

Rather, what I am focused on are the long run dynamic systemic consequences of different levels of elasticity and plasticity. For example, in Co-evolution, I examined the social network within a government agency, where the social structure was very rigid, where the ties of a new person were pretty much the same as their predecessor, and that individuals entered when their were early in their professional career and thus pretty malleable. The result was that structure drove attitudes, not the other way around. One could produce a 2 x 2 typology of networks and plausible resulting dynamics:

High plasticity and low elasticity: homophilous network, where the social structure will drive attitudes (e.g., traditional bureaucracy).

High elasticity and low plasticity: homophilous network, where social systems will polarize along nodal characteristics.

High elasticity and high plasticity: dual possibilities of emerging with a homogeneous, cohesive, network, or polarized cliques that do not talk to each other.

Low elasticity and low plasticity: heterophilous network.

Of course, the above depends a lot on the determinants of the social structure; an inelastic network that forces you to talk with likeminded people has very different implications than an inelastic network that forces you to talk with people who are different from you.

“The Co-evolution of Individual and Network" Journal of Mathematical Sociology, January 2001, 69-108.

Posted by David Lazer at August 16, 2006 10:20 AM

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