Title
Fractal Multi-Level Organisation Of Human Groups In A Virtual World
Abstract
Humans are fundamentally social. They form societies which consist of hierarchically layered nested groups of various quality, size, and structure. The anthropologic literature has classified these groups as support cliques, sympathy groups, bands, cognitive groups, tribes, linguistic groups, and so on. Anthropologic data show that, on average, each group consists of approximately three subgroups. However, a general understanding of the structural dependence of groups at different layers is largely missing. We extend these early findings to a very large high-precision large-scale internet-based social network data. We analyse the organisational structure of a complete, multi-relational, large social multiplex network of a human society consisting of about 400,000 odd players of an open-ended massive multiplayer online game for which we know all about their various group memberships at different layers. Remarkably, the online players' society exhibits the same type of structured hierarchical layers as found in hunter-gatherer societies. Our findings suggest that the hierarchical organisation of human society is deeply nested in human psychology.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1038/srep06526
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Field
DocType
Volume
Sympathy,Social network,Organizational structure,Cognitive psychology,Psychology,Artificial intelligence,Social support,Cognition,The Internet
Journal
4
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2045-2322
5
0.52
References 
Authors
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fuchs Benedikt180.94
Didier Sornette223837.50
Stefan Thurner327826.05