Catching up on papers: the structure of your friendships reflects your culture!

As I said in a previous post, I have been quite some time without posting about my research work or, in other words, about my papers. So I'm starting to trying to catch up on this and I want to do it by highlighting a 2022 paper that I'm very, very excited about: Structural measures of personal networks predict migrants’ cultural backgrounds. An explanation from Grid/Group theory. This is work led by anthropologist José Luis Molina, where we address the issue of simultaneously considering culture and social structure. This has proven a very difficult task, as they require different methodological approaches (e.g., analyzing qualities and attributes versus formal analysis of roles and positions). Mary Douglas and other researchers proposed one of the few attempts to reconcile both dimensions of human societies - structure and culture - with their Grid/Group theory. Building on this idea, in our paper we demonstrated that it was possible to predict cultural traits such as country of origin and religion (instances of the "grid" dimension) by examining the structural characteristics of personal networks of migrants in the USA and Spain (the "group" dimension). The structural measures of personal networks, considered as samples of the social structures in which individuals are embedded, revealed a "cultural signature" indicating the existence of an underlying sociocultural continuum that has not been well understood until now. In other words: out of six groups of migrants from different nationalities in the US and Spain, given their personal network (and just that) we can predict their nationality three times better than random, meaning their networks have info arising from their origin/culture. This promising but preliminary result leads us to continue research on conceptualizing cultural diversity worldwide from a structural perspective, bridging the gap between culture and structure and seeking a new overarching concept. Thanks are of course due to all other co-authors: Juan Ozaita, Ignacio Tamarit, Chris McCarty and H. Russell Bernard.