How Influential People Map Their Social World

How powerful people map their social world

TO Oriel Feldman Hall edited by Daisy Yuhasz

What do social climbers and gossips have in common? My mother would tell me that both are morally suspect. This moral grievance is captured in the lessons from fairy tales and scripture that we readily pass on to our children: Avoid schemers and whisperers.

But stories, as we know, simplify reality. The truth is that the most successful gossips and climbers have a remarkable understanding of social structure and knowledge that they use to deftly navigate their social world. This skill is not a moral failing; it is a cognitive feat. Our minds are complex machines that mentally map our social landscape. Who is close to whom? Who belongs to which group? Who is popular and who is just a step away from power?

Latest work from my laboratory has shown that our minds' representations of the social world—called “cognitive maps”—shape many of our most important social skills. These cards are used to increase influence, clarify when we choose to speak about others, and create stronger connections between those in our immediate circle. Social success depends not only on who you know, but also on how well you understand the invisible architecture of your social world.

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Mapping this social architecture is no small feat. Think about the scale of the problem. Real social networks are huge: there are hundreds of people and tens of thousands of possible connections. Finding out who is related to whom is not a trivial task. Every time a relationship gets better or breaks down, you need to mentally update this map. My colleagues and I wanted to understand what type of cognitive map would allow you to continually monitor the changing social landscape. And perhaps more importantly, we wanted to know why someone would spend time and effort mentally tracking the network of connections that surrounds them. It turns out that building a cognitive map of your social network does quite a bit; in fact, it gives you superpowers.

To better understand social navigation, my colleague Apoorva Bhandari, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University, and I designed a series of studies to explore how people construct cognitive maps. But first we needed a population to follow. We wanted to test these map-making skills on a large group of people who had never met each other but one day found themselves in close proximity. What's better than college freshmen? Over the course of a year, we documented friendships as they formed and faded, creating a vibrant network of about 200 people. We also asked each student to tell us about their personality: “Do you like to socialize or are you more of a quiet person?” Finally, we asked each student to tell us how they thought others were connected, providing a second map of their beliefs about the network.

For example, in one study we found that those who rise to the top Members of the social hierarchy are not the most charismatic or extroverted – they are the best social mappers. By continually asking our participants who their friends are, we can quantify who is most well connected to other well-connected people—that is, who is the most influential in their social network. This work shows that the most powerful people are those who quickly build mental maps of how their peers are connected. Armed with such a map, it is relatively easy to determine who is in what clique or group, and whether there are holes in the network where you can strategically position yourself. In contrast, people who were initially highly influential (connected to many other well-connected people) but did not have accurate mental maps of the network did not remain influential for long.

In the second paper, we examined whether mapping helps 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 to others, and can be an effective way to quickly learn the ins and outs of society. Gossip has even shaped history from the shadows (it was a tool used in the civil rights movements and royal coups, for example), meaning paying attention to gossip streams is likely worthwhile. People seem to be very sensitive to tracking gossip. We rarely come across talk about others, for example, although more than 65 percent of our conversations it's about other people.

To understand how people accomplish this remarkable feat, we asked whether making maps helps predict where information will travel. It takes a lot of mental calculation to figure out which of the many paths gossip can take. You can't just know the connections between your friends; you also need to understand the connections between your friends' friends and other people. We have found that this is where mind maps become very useful, especially because they capture two key features networks: how popular a person is and how far he is from the object of gossip. Maps that measure popularity and distance can be used to quickly identify a good confidant—someone who is far enough away from the target that gossip won't reach them, but is well-connected enough to spread the word effectively.

How does the brain build these maps? Two recent studies from my laboratory explain the mapping mechanism that helps navigate social networks. In one study, still unpublished, we found that the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, a nerve center known for its ability to navigate physical space,also carries a map of connections between people. The more strongly these maps are encoded in the brain, the better people develop the connections that bind their communities together.

In another study, we also found evidence that the brain refines these maps during rest, when it has time to think about all the possible network connections. This process of re-watching a recent experience is known as replay, and is akin to rewinding a movie at high speed. In this case, people at rest seem to unconsciously think about all the connections on the network at unusually high speeds. If the rest period includes sleep, the map becomes blurrier (rather than more accurate).. This may seem problematic, but this vagueness actually helps reveal the overall shape of the network, making it more abstract. Abstraction, by design, naturally highlights the most important structures in the network.— just as impressionist Claude Monet used broad, choppy brushstrokes to reveal important elements in his paintings, allowing his water lilies to come into focus when viewed from a distance. In social networks, abstraction works by highlighting the most important routes, highways, and major arteries of the system. If the brain needs to quickly figure out where gossip might spread, knowing where popular people are or key relationships that connect disparate communities allows us to map out a sequence of connections that can effectively traverse the network.

Surrounded by three children, I often find myself humming the words from the movie. Moana“We set course to find a completely new island, wherever we roam… We know the way..“But strategic wayfinding isn't just for physical space. It's just as essential to being able to effectively navigate our social landscape. Armed with a notoriously fuzzy atlas of our social community, skilled social navigators can do what no GPS can. They see bridges before they're built, sidestep rumor storms, and chart a course toward a common ground.”

Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? Have you read a recent peer-reviewed article that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send proposals to Scientific AmericanMind Matters Editor Daisy Juhasz on [email protected].

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