How Influential People Map Their Social World

How influential people map their social world

By Oriel FeldmanHall edited by Daisy Yuhas

What do social climbers and chatterboxes have in common? My mother told me that both are morally suspect. This moral shadow is etched in the lessons of fairy tales and scripture that we happily pass on to our children: avoid schemers and whisperers.

But we know that stories simplify reality. The truth is that the most effective gossips and social climbers possess a remarkable understanding of social structure, knowledge that they use to intelligently navigate their social world. This skill is not a moral failure; it’s a cognitive feat. Our minds are sophisticated engines that mentally map our social landscapes. Who is close to who? Who belongs to which group? Who is popular and who is one step away from power?

Recent work from my lab has shown that our minds’ representations of the social world – what we call “cognitive maps” – shape many of our essential social skills. These cards are used to increase our influence, determine when we choose to speak about others, and build closer connections between those in our circle. Social success depends not only on who you know, but also on your understanding of the invisible architecture of your social world.

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Mapping this social architecture is no easy task. Consider the scale of the challenge. Real-world social networks are vast, with hundreds of people and tens of thousands of possible connections. Knowing who is connected to whom is not a trivial task. Every time a relationship is forged or destroyed, you must mentally update this map. My colleagues and I wanted to understand what type of cognitive map would make it possible to constantly monitor the evolution of the social landscape. And perhaps more importantly, we wanted to know why someone would take the time and effort to mentally track the web of connections around them. It turns out that building a cognitive map of your social network helps a lot; in fact, it gives you superpowers.

To better understand the powers of social navigation, my collaborator Apoorva Bhandari, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University, and I developed a series of studies to probe how people construct cognitive maps. But first we needed a population to follow. We wanted to test these mapping skills with a large group of people who have never met and yet one day find themselves living nearby. What better option than freshmen? Over the course of a year, we recorded friendships as they formed and disappeared, creating an active network of around 200 people. We also asked each student to tell us about their personality: “Do you like to socialize or are you more of a wallflower?” » Finally, we asked each student to tell us how they thought others were connected, which gave a second map of their beliefs on the network.

In one study, for example, we find that those who reach the top of the social hierarchy are not the most charismatic or the most extroverted: they are the best social mappers. By repeatedly asking our participants who their friends are, we can quantify who is best connected to other well-connected people, that is, who is most influential in their social network. The most influential people, this work shows, are those who quickly construct mental maps of how their peers are connected. Armed with such a map, it is relatively easy to identify who is part of which clique or group or whether there are gaps in the network where you can position yourself strategically. In contrast, people who were initially highly influential – connected to many other well-connected people – but who did not have accurate mental network maps did not remain influential for long.

In a second article, we examined whether mapping contributes to another type of socially adaptive behavior: gossip. Although spilling tea often gets a bad rap, the routine of life is spiced up by the stories we hear or tell others, and this can be an effective way to quickly learn about the ins and outs of community. Gossip has even shaped history from the shadows (for example, it was a tool used in civil rights movements and royal coups), which means that paying attention to currents of gossip is probably a worthy endeavor. People seem very sensitive to gossip. For example, we are rarely caught talking about others, even though more than 65% of our conversations are about other people.

To understand how humans achieve this remarkable feat, we asked whether mapping could predict where information would spread. Calculating which of the many paths the gossip might take requires a bit of mental arithmetic. You can’t just know the connections between your friends; you also need to capture connections between your friends’ friends and beyond. We found that mind maps become very useful in this case, particularly because they capture two key network characteristics: a person’s popularity and their distance from the gossip target. Cards that assess popularity and distance can be used to quickly determine a good confidant, someone who is just far enough away from the target that gossip doesn’t reach them and who is connected enough to spread information effectively.

How does the brain construct these maps? Two recent studies from my laboratory explain the map-making mechanism that enables social orientation. In a previously unpublished study, we discovered that the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex – a neural center known for navigating physical space – also carry a map of connections between people. The more these maps are encoded in the brain, the more people are able to form the bonds that unite their communities.

In another study, we also found that the brain refines these maps at rest, when it has time to think about all possible network connections. This process of revisiting recent experiences is known as replay, similar to rewinding a movie at high speed. In this case, people at rest seem to unconsciously think about all the links in the network at extraordinarily high speeds. If the rest period includes sleep, the map becomes fuzzier (rather than sharper). This may seem problematic, but this blurring actually helps reveal the overall shape of the network by making it more abstract. Abstraction, by design, naturally highlights the most important structures in the network, just as the impressionist Claude Monet used broad, staccato brushstrokes to reveal important elements in his paintings, letting his water lilies come into focus when viewed from a distance. For social networks, abstraction works by highlighting the most important roads, highways and major arteries of the system. If the brain needs to quickly determine where gossip might spread, knowing where popular people or key relationships are located that connect otherwise disconnected communities allows us to trace the sequence of ties that can efficiently traverse the network.

Surrounded by my three children, I often find myself singing the words of the film Moana“We set out to find a whole new island wherever we go… We know the way.“But strategic direction is not just about physical space. It is equally necessary for being able to effectively navigate our social landscapes. Armed with a deliberately fuzzy atlas of our social community, skilled social navigators can do what no GPS can. They see the bridges before they are built, avoid rumor storms, and chart a course toward common ground.

Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed article that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send your suggestions to Scientific AmericanDaisy Yuhas, editor-in-chief of Mind Matters, at dyuhas@sciam.com.

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