Everybody has a social life. Can social network analysis help us understand why not just how? Comment on Pinter-Wollman et al.

摘要

As Trivers (1985) noted in the preface to his book on social evolution, everybody has a social life: “Life is intrinsically social and it evolves through a process of natural selection which is itself social…social evolution refers not only to the evolution of social relationships between individuals but also to deeper themes of biological organization stretching from gene to community.” Typically the study of social behavior and evolution has focused more on the characteristics of the socializing individuals rather than the social interactions themselves until recently. It is increasingly being recognized that understanding the processes that lead to the emergence of sociality and other higher order levels of organization requires an understanding of the social interactions themselves (e.g., Székely et al. 2010; McDonald et al. 2013): It is not necessarily the size.