1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Cognitive social structures (CSS) is the focus of research that investigates how individuals perceive their own social structure (e.g. members of an organization, friend group, hierarchy, company employees, etc.).
[1] One way to analyze a cognitive social structure is to individually look at each “slice”, that is, each member's perception.
Biases in network perception may shift based on the individual (e.g. personality) or the position (e.g. popular, low status).
[1] One approach to studying a cognitive social structure is to measure each member's direct connections (ego networks).
Building a network model in this way can be achieved by asking individuals who they relate to (e.g. “Who do you go to for advice?”), known as a Row Dominated Locally Aggregated Structure, or who is related to them (e.g. “Who goes to you for advice?”), known as a Column Dominated Locally Aggregated Structure.
Similar to a template, schemas provide a basic scaffolding that allow humans to make assumptions about a social structure without remembering every detail individually.
[3][4] Some research suggests that a basic schema people utilize is based on small-world network properties.
These errors in individual and group perceptions has been the focus of much of the research related to cognitive social structures.
In research, a typical method of measuring cognitive social structures involves Specific factors have been shown to influence how easily and how well people are able to learn new networks.
[7] Specifically, behavioral research suggests that individuals are better at learning networks that group members by positive relations (e.g. "liking") and divide groups by negative relations (e.g. "disliking"),[8] individuals are better able to learn people who are at the extremes of a hierarchy, rather than in the middle,[9] and larger networks are easier to remember if they are balanced (if one person is friends with two others, than those two are also friends).
[3] People are also better at remembering large networks if they include kin labels (e.g. "Mother", "Uncle", "Cousin", etc.)
[10][11] Several studies suggest that social network representations track overall patterns of behavior, rather than specific events.
[12] Furthermore, there appears to be a trade-off between overall accuracy and specific event accuracy: those who remember details of a specific interaction tend to have less accurate representations of overall behavior patterns, while those with more accurate pattern representations have more trouble recalling event details.
[20] Much of the research relating social networks to neural measures focuses on physical size and density of brain regions.
Following are specific aspects of individuals that researchers have found influence cognitive social structures.
Need for closure,[28] which refers to one's tendency to avoid ambiguity, has been shown to correlate with the number of ties that are perceived as transitive.
Other individual differences measures have been suggested to influence cognitive social structures, including need for achievement, need for affiliation, and self-monitoring.