UCLA

Humans are incredibly social creatures, and every relationship is part of an individual’s broader social network. Human social networks are large and complex structures (the number of relationships to track increases exponentially with every additional person), posing a huge computational challenge for the mind. Moreover, there are often limitations and biases in information availability (e.g., when entering a new community); it is also typically impossible to monitor the interactions and relationships between all of the people in one’s surroundings. Yet, people rather accurately and seemingly effortlessly remember, track, and make inferences about others’ relationships and patterns thereof (e.g., who is very well-connected). Indeed, the ability to successfully navigate one’s social network is essential for avoiding social missteps and accessing necessary information or resources. Because little research has integrated individual cognition with the social networks one inhabits, very little is known about how people are able to track and use the immense amount of information contained within these structures. Through my dissertation research, I seek to understand (i) how different people mentally represent their social networks through the use of priors regarding how relationships are formed, (ii) how the human brain supports this process, (iii) how one’s mental map of relationships shapes one’s interactions with others, and (iv) how one’s assumptions of behavioral homophily (i.e., that similarly behaving people are likely to become friends with one another) shape predictions of future friendships. To this end, I created novel, experimentally controlled paradigms in which participants learn new networks with minimal extraneous information to rigorously and systematically examine these processes. That is, I decouple social network knowledge from other factors that may covary along with it in real-world contexts to examine how people acquire, neurally encode, and use social network knowledge in their everyday life, and how various contexts shape these processes. My research helps explain a vital and universal skillset that humans possess: the ability to understand and navigate their complex social worlds.