Over the last couple of weeks a few interesting research items on social psychology and social network analysis have crossed our desks – so we have compiled them into this collection of research tidbits for Christmas. Enjoy!
In-flight influence
First up, a study that shows how the decisions of people around us influence our decisions, even if we don’t know the people. This elegant piece of analysis, written up in this working paper and covered by the Washington Post (albeit with a misleading headline) shows how our decisions about whether to purchase in-flight food and drink are influenced by those around us. Because the study had access to reservations data, it was able to exclude groups travelling together, and control for parameters such as seat choice.
The research found that people sitting near other purchasers were 30% more likely to make in-flight purchases. If this is the the level of influence that strangers hold over us, how much more is our behaviour influenced by those who we care about? Answer: in Idiro’s experience, lots.
The same Washington Post article referred to an interesting piece of research demonstrating the power of peer pressure in schools. Message to all parents: make sure your kids are in classes with people cleverer and more diligent than them.
A link analysis of languages

There are plenty of studies showing how which languages are spoken by the greatest number of people, which languages are economically the most powerful – but which languages serve as the pivots between other, less popular languages? To put it another way, if you speak a minority language (like Welsh) and want to understand it written in another (e.g. Kikuyu), which other languages are necessary to make the link? In this case, most Welsh speakers know English, as do many Kikuyu speakers – so the answer is simple: just English.
Quartz published details of an interesting MIT study looking at this in depth, using three data sources: multi-lingual Wikipedia editors, multi-lingual Twitter accounts, and book translations. The data is displayed in an interactive website but it’s worth watching this video, as it’s a complex enough study.
One can criticise the data sources, of course (for example, the great firewall of China restricts Chinese Twitter usage) but nevertheless it’s a fascinating topic. Here in multi-cultural Idiro, the most common hub language is English (of course), followed, we observe, by Russian.
How many friends?
How many people do we have contact with through our mobile phones? Idiro’s researchers took a week’s worth of connection data from a European mobile phone network, and counted the number of different phones that each person had contact with over a week. We then plotted the distribution of the number of contacts each phone had – in other words, the total number of links per person. As the graph shows, a number of phones were (as one would expect) used rarely or not at all that week. A few users made over sixty unique connections in a week, and a large number of people made between 5 and 15 connections. We compared Christmas with an average summer week. and found – no surprise – that people make more connections over Christmas week, as we renew old friendships.

Finally, here is a study

by Hill and Dunbar demonstrating that Christmas card networks are (or were, when we used to send Christmas card to all our friends) a reasonable approximation of Dunbar’s number – 150.
Merry Christmas to all, from the Idiro team