Absence makes the heart grow fonder: social compensation when failure to interact risks weakening a relationship

摘要

Social networks require active relationship maintenance if they are to bekept at a constant level of emotional closeness. For primates, includinghumans, failure to interact leads inexorably to a decline in relationshipquality, and a consequent loss of the benefits that derive from individualrelationships. As a result, many social species compensate for weakenedrelationships by investing more heavily in them. Here we study how humansbehave in similar situations, using data from mobile call detail records from aEuropean country. For the less frequent contacts between pairs of communicatingindividuals we observe a logarithmic dependence of the duration of thesucceeding call on the time gap with the previous call. We find that suchbehaviour is likely when the individuals in these dyadic pairs have the samegender and are in the same age bracket as well as being geographically distant.Our results indicate that these pairs deliberately invest more time incommunication so as to reinforce their social bonding and prevent theirrelationships decaying when these are threatened by lack of interaction.