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Contribution of Social Network Analysis and Collective Phenomena to Understanding Social Complexity and Cognition

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Evolution of Primate Social Cognition

Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Evolution Research ((IDER,volume 5))

Abstract

The social brain hypothesis postulates the increasing complexity of social interactions as a driving force for the evolution of cognitive abilities. Whereas dyadic and triadic relations play a basic role in defining social behaviours and pose many challenges for the social brain, individuals in animal societies typically belong to relatively large networks. How the structure and dynamics of these networks also contribute to the evolution of cognition, and vice versa, is less understood. Here we review how collective phenomena can occur in systems where social agents do not require sophisticated cognitive skills, and how complex networks can grow from simple probabilistic rules, or even emerge from the interaction between agents and their environment, without explicit social factors. We further show that the analysis of social networks can be used to develop good indicators of social complexity beyond the individual or dyadic level. We also discuss the types of challenges that the social brain must cope within structured groups, such as higher information fluxes, originating from individuals playing different roles in the network, or dyadic contacts of widely varying durations and frequencies. We discuss the relevance of these ideas for primates and other animals’ societies.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge financial support from DGPA-PAPIIT grant IN105015, CONACYT grant 157656 and Instituto Politecnico Nacional. We thank Louise Barrett for fruitful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México

    Denis Boyer

  2. Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México

    Denis Boyer & Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez

  3. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigación para el Desarrollo Integral Regional (CIIDIR) Unidad Oaxaca, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Oaxaca, México

    Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez

Authors
  1. Denis Boyer
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  2. Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez
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Correspondence to Denis Boyer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georg-August-University Goettingen, Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen, Germany

    Laura Desirèe Di Paolo

  2. Department of Environmental Biology, Sapienzà Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Fabio Di Vincenzo

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, MI, USA

    Francesca De Petrillo

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Boyer, D., Ramos-Fernandez, G. (2018). Contribution of Social Network Analysis and Collective Phenomena to Understanding Social Complexity and Cognition. In: Di Paolo, L.D., Di Vincenzo, F., De Petrillo, F. (eds) Evolution of Primate Social Cognition. Interdisciplinary Evolution Research, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93776-2_8

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