Category: Uncategorized

A year ago almost to the date, I had started to update this blog as it had been silent for a while, and I did it by summarizing all the activities I had done during that long period (Long time no see). By May 2023, I had written several posts and the again my activity in the blog ground to a halt. My last post then was about a new paper on the relation between culture and the structure of social relationships. This was a really auspicious choice of topic, as nine months later I write a new post to let everybody now about the new grant I got to study this issue.

A few days ago I got word that my proposal on "Mapping Cultural Diversity through Personal Networks" had been selected for funding by the new Fundamentos program of Fundación BBVA. This is a newly established program giving out fairly generous grants but very limited: only one per each one of the five areas of study they consider. And they selected my grant to be the one for Social Science, which makes very, very proud and happy about my interdisciplinary career as researcher in Complex Systems. Of course, by no means it is my merit only: success came because of the awesome team involved, which includes José Luis Molina (UAB) and Christopher McCarty (U Florida) as co-PIs, and truly excellent researchers like Angel Cuevas and Rubén Cuevas at my own university.

I will post about this project often for the next three years (let's hope so!) but for the time being I'll just give you a glimpse of what the project is about (beyond extending the work we already did in the paper mentioned above) by quoting a paragraph from the application: "This research aims to explain the co-variation of cultural and structural dimensions, combining worldwide cognitive, behavioral, and archive data (survey, traces, and HRAF respectively). As far as we know, this research represents a novel and innovative approach to the understanding of human societies, offering a promising avenue for future cross-cultural studies. We expect to significantly contribute to several fields, including anthropology, psychology, sociology, network science, and computational social science." Already looking forward to start working on this!

PS. I'm doubly happy about this call because the grant on the Bio area went to my former Ph D student and good friend Saúl Ares, who will be studying the physical basis of cell division in minimal and synthetic cells. This speaks also of his own interdisciplinary career as he, like myself, is a physicist. So two out of five grants have come to our research group, GISC, which is a tremendous achievement!

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.

The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 call for applications will open on 12 April and close on 13 September 2023. Info on the call is available here.

If you are looking for a supervisor to work on applications of complex systems to social questions, such as social norm dynamics, personal relationship structure, societal network structure, behavioral experiments, computational social science or related stuff, do contact me, happy to explore options with you!

Just a couple lines to tell you how proud I am to have been appointed an expert of "Los 100 de COTEC". COTEC Foundation has the mission to promote innovation as an engine of social and economic development. In the last few years, it has become a true agent of change that contributes to the development of the Spanish economy and society, based on a more ambitious definition of the concept of innovation: "Innovation is any change (not only technological) based on knowledge (not only scientific) that generates value (not only economic)."

Los 100 de COTEC is a network of experts who speak Spanish, from multiple areas of knowledge, prepared to analyze the great social, economic and technological challenges facing innovation. They stand out for their training, experience, relational capital and capacity for dissemination.

I'm really honored to join such a distinguished network and I hope I can help COTEC pursue their goals.

I have a new paper out with Ignacio Tamarit and José A. Cuesta on the structure of personal relationships. In short: we extend the idea of Dunbar circles to the continuum so all types of data can be considered. In more detail: In the early 2000's Robin Dunbar and co-authors showed that our personal relationships are organized in circles: 3-5 very close relationships, add 10-12 for the circle of close friends, another 30-40 join as friends, and acquaintainces add up to about 150. Note that the size of circles scale by a factor of 3: the sequence is approximately 5-15-50-150. Beyond that, there is evidence for a larger circle of ~500 people, see e.g., the paper by Miranda Lubbers, José Luis Molina and Hugo Valenzuela. There is a lot of empirical evidence that the circles exist. But in 2018, our team along with Robin Dunbar showed mathematically that this is the only way relationships of different intensities can be organized if cognitive capacity is limited. In fact, our theory predicted the circles as we know it, but also another regime that should be observed in small populations, where almost everybody is in the first circle for lack of enough people to be friends with (inverted regime). Data from José Luis Molina confirmed it.

However, the division on circles is somewhat arbitrary, and often data on relationships is continuous, like duration of phone calls or of face-to-face encounters. In our new paper we develop the corresponding mathematical theory to describe this. We check our theory with data from phones (Sune Lehmann et al), from face-to-face encounters (Ciro Cattuto, Alain Barrat et al) and from facebook (Arnaboldi et al). The theory describes pretty well all these datasets, and a majority of the individuals in the data are well described by one-parameter theory, with parameter value 6, which is in exact correspondance with the 3 factor of the discrete Dunbar circles. Thus, the model captures a universal feature of how we manage our relationships, and makes it clear that their structure exhibits the signature of a resource allocation problem both in the discrete and in the continuum versions. Stay tuned for further, awesome evidence of this limited resource mechanism in other contexts, hopefully coming out soon in a journal near you. Thanks to Ignacio and Jose, and to Robin Dunbar for support.

El proyecto IBSEN, del que soy responsable, va a comenzar la campaña 21-22 de experimentos, así que como miembro de nuestra comunidad universitaria, te invitamos a colaborar con nuestra investigación participando en los experimentos del proyecto (http://ibsen-h2020.eu, breve video resumen en https://youtu.be/gQusSBlDR8o). IBSEN es un proyecto de investigación que fue financiado por el programa Horizonte 2020 de la Unión Europea y que en la actualidad sigue adelante desarrollado por investigadores del Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC, http://www.gisc.es). 

A finales de octubre o principios de noviembre comenzaremos a lanzar experimentos, y para ello te pedimos tu colaboración.

Si ya conocías el proyecto y estás inscrito en nuestra base de datos de voluntarios, no tienes que hacer nada.

Si no nos conocías y te inscribes como se indica debajo, en cuanto retomemos las sesiones experimentales, en un plazo de unas semanas, recibirás información por correo electrónico sobre la posibilidad de participar. 
Una vez abierta una sesión o sesiones de un experimento, solo tienes que inscribirte en la que quieras hasta completar los voluntarios necesarios (normalmente en cada experimento solo se podrá participar una vez). La participación en estos experimentos, que están sujetos a aprobación del Comité de Ética de la Universidad, involucra sólo decisiones sencillas en situaciones modelo, y todos los datos que se generan se anonimizan, con lo que tu privacidad está perfectamente salvaguardada. Además, en la mayoría de experimentos, recibirás una pequeña remuneración económica por tu participación. La participación es online en la gran mayoría de los casos, por lo que no necesitarás desplazarte a ningún sitio para ser voluntario.

Muchos experimentos se anuncian primero en Twitter para no bombardearte con correos electrónicos, y muchas veces se llenan sin necesidad de llegar a enviar correos. Si quieres recibir información por esta vía, sigue a @IBSEN_H2020.

Para inscribirte y poder participar en nuestros experimentos, haz click en http://participantes.ibsen-h2020.eu para registrarte e incorporar tus datos de contacto y algunos datos demográficos a la base de datos IBSEN. 

Beneficios por tu participación:       

1) Contribuirás a la ciencia y a la mejora global de la sociedad.       
2) Proporcionarás visibilidad internacional a la investigación de la UC3M.              
3) Recibirás una pequeña remuneración económica inmediata cuando participes en alguno de nuestros experimentos.

Finalmente, te agradeceríamos que difundieras esta información entre todos tus familiares, amigos y conocidos. ¡De esta manera ya nos estarías ayudando! La inscripción está abierta a todo el mundo aunque no sea miembro de nuestra comunidad universitaria. En el espíritu de la ciencia ciudadana y abierta, todos podemos contribuir. 

Para cualquier consulta relativa al proyecto IBSEN, por favor envía un correo a ibsen.gisc@gmail.com

Algunos ejemplos de trabajos científicos recientes realizados en el marco del proyecto: 

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25734-w
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77711-w
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-50964-w

El proyecto IBSEN agradece la colaboración de la Dirección y los Decanatos de los centros de la UC3M para la difusión de esta convocatoria, que será clave para alcanzar nuestros objetivos de investigación, y por supuesto la de todos aquellos que os inscribáis para participar.  

I am very happy to tell you about a new paper of mine coming out in Nature Communications: "Evidence from a long-term experiment that collective risks change social norms and promote cooperation" (open access link) with Aron Szekely, Francesca Lipari, Alberto Antonioni, Mario Paolucci, Luca Tummolini and Giulia Andrighetto.

In the paper, we present results of a long-term, online experiment with ~300 participants specifically designed to unveil the interplay of social norms and facing collective risks (such as, e.g., climate change). First, we show that there is a strong association between contribution and social expectations (empirical and normative expectations), personal beliefs (personal normative beliefs), and dispositions based on unconditional contributions and expectations. Participants increase their contribution in response to higher empirical and normative expectations even reacting to a belief that has no material implication for them. Strikingly, subjects respond more to normative expectations than they do to empirical expectations!

To understand why cooperation changes according to expectations, we use k-means clustering to classify subjects in empirical cooperators, normative cooperators, social norm followers, threshold-driven subjects and unconditional ones. We find stronger social norms in high-risk settings. Risk changes norms and coordinates and motivates social expectations and contributions leading to higher cooperation under high risk, whereas stronger norms provide greater resistance to behavioral change than loose ones.

In summary, we find greater cooperation and stronger social norms in high-risk environments and slower behavior change when risk changes and social norms are stronger. Also, social norms predict cooperation, causally affect behavior, and lead to punishment of norm-breakers. As a general remark, we show that a precise, measurable definition of social norm allows quantitative analyses lead to insights about the feedbacks between norms and behavior, leading to specific predictions of optimal behavioral change interventions relevant to global societal challenges.

I'm happy to report that I have a new paper out with Pablo Lozano and Sergey Gavrilets in which we present a model for the emergence of hierarchies compatible with cooperation. A few years ago, in an experimental paper we found that hierarchy (understood as privileged access to jointly generated resources) hinders cooperation among human subjects (although when hierarchy was not linear but in groups this did not occur, see subsequent paper). With the model we have just introduced, we show that when hierarchies are dynamical and can evolve through fights among the individuals, much like in primate societies in general, then a large fraction of people still cooperate. Note that this is not good news, in the sense that what happens typically is that the society splits in an upper class and a lower class, with the former exploiting the latter that has to cooperate in order to have a chance to earn a living. Ugly, but kind of realistic. We believe that this model is a relevant step to understand how egalitarian societies could evolve to hierarchical, class-split ones, highlighting the importance of dynamical hierarchies and suggesting fighting as a possible mechanism for that dynamics.

I have a new paper out with Federico Pablo-Martí and Ángel Alañón-Pardo, in which we use a huge review of historical sources, complex network science and agent-based simulations to show that the road network in Spain is not an invention of the Bourbon kings upon arrival at the throne after the Succession War. The paper is here and I tweeted executive summaries in English and in Spanish (pdf versions can be found respectively here and here).